I often get questions about what it’s like to do an undergrad at Oxford @CompSciOxford. I didn’t do my own undergrad here, but I do find it a lot of fun teaching here (we have great students!)

This thread is to give you some inside info on @UniofOxford if you plan to apply [1/n]

Oxford is a collegiate university, so undergrads get taught both by the department, and also by college. I teach at both - giving lectures at the department, and tutorials at college. [2/n]

College teaching is done in small groups, known as tutorials (usually 2 students and one tutor). In these we go over the material and problems you got taught in the lectures (by the way, we do actually do tutorials out on the grass when it’s sunny!) [3/n]

Even admissions are done at the college level - when you apply to CS at Oxford you select two colleges, and you get interviewed by the tutors at each college - multiple times! In the interview you get asked puzzle questions about CS and maths [4/n]

In my college, Christ Church @ChCh_Access, we only started teaching CS three years ago (CS has been around since 1950. College has been around since 1546. I guess after 70 years they decided that CS is not going away and they might as well teach it)
https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/university/student/christ-church-oxford
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Starting CS at Christ Church from scratch allowed us to build it bottom-up, shaping it with equal opportunity, diversity, and inclusivity in mind. We have students from all over the world, and funding to support deserving students who wouldn’t be able to join us otherwise [6/n]

We want to build-up our students and provide opportunities to the smartest kids out there. We have awesome students and tutors, fun events, and we aim to keep you challenged. [7/n]

Last year we had a fireside chat with Sir Tim Berners-Lee @timberners_lee (inventor of the WWW & fellow at College) talking about the early days of the internet, and with Martin Haeberli @mhaeberli (original Macintosh team) talking about the early days of personal computing [8/n]

Because of covid, we replaced first years’ CS exams at Christ Church this year with "challenges”. Our students came up with awesome stuff, like developing their own programming languages and theorem provers:
https://github.com/tc-lang/trenchcoat https://github.com/b-grant/Truth-Tree-Project

They also worked on deep learning, and even developed a linear algebra library for Scala:
https://github.com/OrlinKuch/MLProject2020 https://github.com/acapraru/Linear-Algebra-Library-for-Scala

Next year we'll have two new tutors joining us, Lars Kunze @kula78 and Andrey Kravchenko, who will join our Irwin Zaid @irwinzaid. Half of our tutors are entrepreneurs, also developing their startups when they're not teaching [11/n]

I would highly recommend applying to join us. Admissions deadline is 15 October (to start next year, 2021):
http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/how_to_apply/index.html
If you have any questions, you can chat to our current students here:
https://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/admissions/chat 
or email us directly!
https://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/research-and-academia/subject-area/computer-science
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By the way, don't forget to register to the Maths Admissions Test (MAT) by the same deadline!
http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/how_to_apply/ucas.html
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