How much will the MSc in GGD cost in 2009-10 ?

I just got an e-mail asking this question. I was curious and looked it up:

£12,500 for British or EU/EEA students

£16,500 for overseas students

then you also have about £2,000 for your college fee

My response: holy shit, that's A LOT more than I paid. At least the pound has plunged in value, but still! Oxford sure as hell doesn't devote all that money to providing resources to the MSc in GGD!

What kind of year has it been?

New Year's is almost upon us. The time when people reflect on the last year and make their resolutions for 2009.

My advice would be to set multiple goals. If some of them work out fine, great. If some don't work out, at least you tried something new and hopefully had nothing to lose anyway.

If you are visiting this blog you are either enrolled in GGD already or hope to be. Aside from you maybe having better odds at getting accepted to another programme at Oxford (do look them up!), you have nothing to lose by applying. The worst that can happen is they reject you. Just don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Here are some of my goals for 2009. Some will work out, others probably won't. But by trying I will at least accomplish some of them.

-- Study a new language
-- Try and learn about finance / economics (right now it just doesn't make any sense to me, and I'd like to be able to understand what the Global Financial Crisis is all about)
-- Find a new job where my MSc in GGD is an asset and not a liability
-- Lay the groundwork for my next grad school search - I hope to be able to jump back into the academic world again when I have the money to make a second go at it
-- Learn to ride a bicycle LOL
-- Travel more!

With that, have a great 2009!

Back from the beach

I'm back and able to take your questions again after a week away. Got to see several relatives for the first time in four years. Plus how many people can say they've been able to go for a walk on a sunny beach in mid-December?

Hope all of you have a nice end to 2008!

Oxbridge interviews?

Someone recently asked if their were interviews involved in the application process for the MSc in GGD. Luckily, along with standardised exams, NO!

GGD either gives you a yes or no on your application.

The only time you could potentially be grilled by the powers that be is during the final examination process. If you are on the borderline between pass/fail or distinction/pass, they give you an oral exam. This is very rare though, and didn't happen to anyone my year.

A good statement of purpose outline

Hey all. Found the outline I used for my statement of purpose:

A statement of purpose: you should give an account of your motivation for study at Oxford. You may wish to consider a number of issues: what relevant academic, research or practical experience do you have? Why are you applying to this particular programme of study? What areas of study in the subject interest you? The statement of purpose should be one page long and should be submitted as a separate sheet enclosed at the end of your application

So...

Paragraph 1 -- about you/your past/careful not to just restate your CV
Paragraph 2 -- why GGD? BS a bit...
Paragraph 3 -- what options are you interested in studying? possible dissertation topics? make sure they are do-able through GGD

Links section is live -- check it out

Hopefully some useful resources for you.

Some interesting new resources have appeared on the GGD website

I was planning on setting up a links section for the blog and went to the QEH GGD website to get their URL and found the following:

* MSc GGD Course Guide 2008-09 (PDF Format)
* MSc GGD Programme Specification (PDF Format)

Both were posted December 8. I'm glad they are releasing some information for you all! Really worth looking through, and it looks like they have some interesting new course options for you too.

Question for November deadline applicants...

Have any of you heard back from QEH yet in regards to admissions?

Quantitative methods aka statistics aka who would blink first?

The post I didn't really want to write but needed to be written...

I don't know where to start. Out of my 4-5 years in higher education, this would be the only time I've felt a class has gone after people below the belt and given students a truly rotten deal. Even some of the QEH people admitted this was a pile of, well, shit. This experience really shocked me. And what shocked me more is that the statistics teacher, Dr Fu, is still teaching the GGD stats.

To get my undergrad degree in politics, I had to take a methods class. To take said methods class, I had to take a straight math class. I did alright in both despite their teachers having problems. In fact, both teachers were later forced out or let go by my university. Their failings paled in comparison to Dr Fu. She would have been let go by my undergrad school. Really. No joke.

Dr Fu is a developmental economist at QEH, originally from Cambridge. She probably got the unlucky assignment to have to teach us all statistics. But the way she went about it was very incomprehensible. I don't think she even knew what the programme was called exactly. Many of her slides said 'Global Governance and Development'.

Many of the students in the class had not touched maths since they were 16. They were thrown into this with little preparation and were left behind the second week. Fu went too fast, and didn't seem to care people were lost. Complicating matters was that two textbooks were assigned, which roughly covered the same content but in different ways. She couldn't just pick one. And an even further complication, Fu did not communicate what she was teaching every week to the class TA, with which we had an additional session and assigned us homework. This homework had nothing to do with what Fu was lecturing. Additional confusion.

While this was happening I was mainly focused on trying to get something going on my dissertation. Students started to complain and I had to focus back on stats and put off my dissertation until the term break. Fu argued that we had it easy compared to other stats classes in say economics or development. But we were GGD and this was just supposed to expose us to the concept of statistics in research and allow us to interpret the work of others. At the initial stage of confusion, some students wanted something to be done, while others thought Fu was nice and should be given more time to get things up to speed.

Once we realised we were all screwed, it was too late. I personally tried to approach the programme director about what was going on, but was shut down and told to just complain to the class reps and it would be dealt with at the next committee meeting. Several weeks later the meeting happened and nothing really came of it. The powers that be were siding with Fu.

Things got worse and people started to spend their entire time on statistics, fearing they would fail the research methods test over it (and thus the entire programme -- see the grading section of the blog for more). I even started to fear I would fail the damn thing. I tracked down the statistics book I used in undergrad to good results and really focused on that. Fu made no sense, but in theory I had done all this before.

As the last week of stats approached, we had to present a useless group project. We also had the 'mock exam' which we later learned was made up by the TA and Fu hadn't even looked at. Almost all the students failed the mock exam. The problems didn't even make sense to two classmates, that had engineering degrees from their undergrad!

As this developed, we got some concessions from Fu. There would be a review section, and we could use calculators on the exam (this was originally off the table). Fu also told us we could have a formula section to reference on the exam, but that she would put extra ones there to keep us from checking them off and at the same time some of the formulas we needed wouldn't be there so we would learn them. Okay...

The powers that be also said they had shown the final exam questions to some other profs who said it was a reasonable test for grad students. We kept trying to get Fu to produce a mock exam for us herself, but the best we got were some formulas.

As the exam approached many of us were very concerned. I spent most of my time studying up on the social theories, hoping I could score very high on them to absorb an almost or near fail on the stats question. (We had to do 2 of one and 1 of the other). I also became very close friends with my old stats book from undergrad.

At this point I thought that at least two of my classmates who hadn't done maths for over 10 years were at a high risk of failing the exam. I and several others were also pretty on edge. At the same time, this also raised 'the nuclear option' / 'the chicken principle'. If one person failed, it would prove that the programme was sufficiently rigorous. But 2-3-4 people failing would give a still very new programme a lot of attention it may not want from high up in the university food chain. My gamble was that since no one person seemed to be having a lot more problems than any other, the odds suggested that if there were failures, it would be more than one person (and I'd probably be the fourth person in to be hit). I could do as much as I good to try and shore up my position, but I figured TPTB at GGD would blink first.

When we finally saw the exam the stats questions had been simplified. Had we been put through hell for no reason, or had Fu been forced to re-do the questions to be more user friendly? I have no idea. But everyone passed in the end. GGD's TPTB had been the ones to blink!

I ended up spending probably 75% of my exam prep time on research methods. Remember, all you need to do is pass and anything extra doesn't really matter. Low and behold, research methods was my highest individual score.

Yes it had a good ending. But there is no excuse for the road to that end having so many obstacles to handle.

Qualitative methods

A current description (warning, could cause a headache if concentrated on too much):

In Part I of Research Methods in the Social Sciences, students are made familiar with the full
range of qualitative research techniques, including their epistemological background.
The course starts from the broadest possible viewpoint by critically discussing the notion of
progress in science. Subsequently it addresses the question of whether and to what extent
there are two separate cultures: science vs. humanities, or ‘Quant’ vs. ‘Qual’. We then discuss
different qualitative approaches and see how they relate concept formation to case selection,
and how they assess case studies in order to derive causal generalizations.
On that basis, the question about separate cultures can be reformulated. Are there incompati-
bilities between the worldviews of different traditions in the social sciences: explanation vs.
understanding, or content vs. discourse analysis? We examine the implications of attempts to
make qualitative methods ‘travel’ in time, across space and among people. We also discuss
the more radical approaches of genealogy, dialectics, and critical theory.
In the final session, we discuss pragmatism and abduction as an alternative research strategy.

Uh, okay.

I had hoped to learn a bit about actual research from this class. I had done little research in undergrad, instead writing many argumentative essays. I like learning about new things, but don't like having to follow that rigid but uncertain research format. Maybe if I was comfortable with the formal research methods I would have a different view on the whole thing.

Instead this class was reading about people who theorised about the actual people that theorised social theories. So it managed to be both anti-practical and anti-theoretical at the same time. Go ESRC! We were assigned tons of reading about social theory, Nietsche to Marx to Foucault, Weber, Durkheim, positivism/postpositivism, epistemology, ontology, dialectics, critical analysis, postmodernism, etc.

Luckily my undergrad school liked to encourage people studying a social science to also learn about other social sciences. I had courses in psychology, anthropology, economics plus postmodernism. And for sociology class, I took the advanced theory course since some of my friends were in it.

Many of the assigned readings were long and dense. No one really did any readings outside of needing to produce summaries. For the class discussions, I increasingly relied on what I had learned before in postmodernism, anthropology and sociological theory. I would have been lost otherwise. In fact, focusing too much on the qualitative class caused more confusion. I just got through it by focusing on what I learned and still knew from undergrad.

UPDATE (11/09): I would like to stress that there is now a different teacher for this class. My description applies to the prior incarnation and shouldn't be applied to this specific class as currently taught.

Research Methods

Don't expect to actually learn anything practical about doing research in this part of the course. Really.

This is its official description:

The course in Research Methods will develop common research methods in the social sciences and will include, but not be limited to, the topics of concept formation, mechanisms and theory building, comparative method, case selection, historiography, dialectics, ethnography, genealogy, textual content and discourse analysis, qualitative interviewing techniques, field research and common quantitative analytic methods.

Research Methods is broken up into two parts each taught by a different person: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative is supposed to expose you to the theories of knowledge that should somehow impact how you do research, and quantitative is supposed to expose you to the basic concepts of statistics.

Each component doesn't relate to global governance or diplomacy. The qualitative one has a sociological theory bent, while the statistics has a developmental economics bent. And math and economics has always scared me. I've taken economics, twice, and it still makes no sense to me. Math I could handle, if the teacher did a good job explaining it.

And there was something else that didn't exactly fit right with me about Research Methods. It was 'recognised' by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as providing students with a research background necessary to prepare them for doctoral study. In fact this was stressed again and again. So yes, I put that claim on my CV...

What is this ESRC?

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funds research and training in social and economic issues. We are an independent organisation, established by Royal Charter, but receive most of our funding through the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. Our budget of £181 million (2007/2008) funds over 2,500 researchers in academic institutions and policy research institutes throughout the UK. We also support more than 2,000 postgraduate students.

When there was talk of changing the exam structure due to the statistics complications which will be discussed in the next post, the head of QEH was adamant that it couldn't be changed, because of 'legal issues' and the ESRC recognition of GGD. My theory, though I don't have any evidence, is that QEH got some funding money from the ESRC as part of this recognition process. Somehow the Research Methods structure reflected the ESRC requirements more than the practicality of global governance / diplomacy and political science in general. Why go through all the trouble otherwise?

After this post, I'll do posts on Qualitative, Quantitative and finally the exam.

The 'issues' post

This post has been sitting in the draft section nearly finished for about two weeks now. I finally figured since I took a while writing it, I might as well finish it off.

So far I've tried to be open about my experiences in the GGD programme and offer constructive criticism where it has been appropriate. But after covering the interesting stuff, that leaves the more problematic areas to cover. Now this is just one person's opinion, but in general many of my classmates had very similar problems and concerns as well. Things very well may have changed since I was there too, and I do hope they have. But I feel after giving Oxford several thousand pounds of my money, I've earned my right to have an opinion about all this, and that you should be a fully informed consumer.

I've talked about GGD's structural challenges: not really being in the right department, having difficulty finding people the right dissertation advisers, lacking resources, plus problems with the Department of IR/Politics and some Oxford colleges.

Here are some of the other problem areas I'll be covering:
-- the 'Joint Consultative Committee' (JCC)
-- the Research Methods course

One of my main concerns while I was there was the lack of transparency. My undergrad school had its share of problems, but it was very transparent and gave its students a truly fair deal. Not only did the professor grade the students, but the students would fill out anonymous course evaluation forms that would be read by departmental heads and higher up the food chain. These forms would influence if a professor was promoted, offered a full time time job if not on staff and could even lead to the dismissal of a professor. It happened more than once in some of my classes.

GGD would have us fill out periodic course evaluations. But we were a very small group, and some individual classes had less than 5 people in them. I felt it wouldn't exactly be the best idea to fill out these forms with my real opinion till my exam results were in! And that wouldn't be till the end of the programme. And at no time while I was there did my Oxford College, or the federal university, inquire as to how the programme was going. Even when GGD was concluding. How would the programme respond to student feedback and have any pressure to implement changes if there was no one on the outside receiving it? (Well, some of the other Colleges did take an interest in their students and ask for feedback, which did impact how they dealt with GGD and QEH, so some change occurred there)

In fact, only after I graduated did the College or federal university take an interest in me, and that was simply to beg for money. (Hell, one big letter came last week which probably brought a lot of this back in my mind.) Oxford didn't really care about the programme, except to get as much money out of it as possible. Well, Oxford won't be getting any more money out of me for a while...

One of the ways GGD is supposed to be accountable to the students is the Joint Consultative Committee, the JCC. Two students would be elected to serve as class representatives and represent the interests of the students at these termly meetings with GGD faculty and the head of QEH. (Yes, there were only three meetings during the entire programme. Not exactly enough time to actually raise concerns and have them be acted on before it was too late.) However, this didn't work out that well in practice. While GGD would 'listen' to student concerns, they would be quickly dismissed as representing the views of only one or two people. Even worse, the class reps would have to face the heat for raising some difficult issues. Eventually the class reps came up with the idea of having everyone fill out an anonymous survey so they could have quantifiable data to back up our concerns. Most of which were dismissed. (I should note here that Alan Hunt did take a lot of the feedback into account, which was appreciated by many. While he never opened up on the reading list issue or the exam issue, it did impact the tutorials and lectures.)

An aside: three people in my group (including me) were interested in being the class representatives. I had done much the same thing in undergrad, and had gotten good results at it too for fellow students (most of the school administration knew me, which was both a good and bad thing in the end), and said I would do it if no one else was interested. I dropped out before there would be a vote with the two other people. This was actually a really lucky break on my part. It would have been a thankless job where you would antagonise the powers that be by necessity, and I probably would have gone into undergrad lawyer mode too. Another circular firing squad, but this time with no checks and balances.

When I tried to raise concerns about the statistics class, I was shot down and told to tell the class reps about it for the next meeting (which of course was two months away). I was really shocked how the statistics issue was handled. And everyone was really on their own.

Okay, up next: GGD Blog goes in depth into the Research Methods course:
-- Why this is even is the programme (hint, money is probably involved)
-- Qualitative Research Methods (which really is a social theory class)
-- Quantitative Research Methods (UGH!)
-- The exam (people could actually fail?)

Then I am off to an undisclosed location for a break near the beach...

Exit Strategies

George W Bush went into Iraq without an exit strategy. It is a buzz word but an important concept. You really need an exit strategy before you set foot in Oxford, or even before you accept your offer of admission. Aim for something sustainable, don't just go all in on Oxford and expect the cards to be dealt all in your favour.

GGD is an action packed nine months. Yes, it does have 2 seven-week breaks. But don't let that fool you. You won't have that much free time. The classes themselves are fairly easy, minus statistics (which is difficult for all the wrong reasons). Instead, you will spend most of your time having to 'handle things' that come up at you. Alright that is a vague euphemism I admit. But honestly that's the best way I think I can put it. There is just a lot of logistical mechanisations to deal with, chief among them the dissertation process and other complications.

When I accepted my GGD offer, I focused on the what-will-it-be-like-to-live-in-Oxford details. GGD itself was a blank canvas. When confronted with a blank canvas, people tend to project their own assumptions onto it. And with Oxford, people automatically have assumptions whenever the word has even been mentioned. I had even been to Oxford before as a tourist for a couple days, which in a way gave me a false sense of security when I first got there since I knew where many places were etc.

Honestly I had no real plan for what I would do after I got there. So made lots of assumptions and assumed since it was Oxford things would just work out for me. Wrong. I'd assumed being at Oxford for GGD would afford me the opportunity to stay on at Oxford and do more graduate work. Or failing that, Oxford could lead to some nice job offers. Very wrong. The only real time you have to do such things, if they are at all possible, is right after you get there. And of course you do not know that at the time as you are trying to settle in, get adjusted, and get your dissertation adviser signed on before the break in two months.

The best time to line up a post-GGD job is before you go to Oxford. Probably the only time you'll have to do it. And don't expect Oxford to help with anything either. You are just there to bring them some quick money remember. And your odds of staying on at Oxford if you aren't on a Rhodes / Marshall or similar scholarship is very low. Only know of one person who was able to do so, and that was an MBA.

It's safe to assume you will make it through and pass the programme. But don't assume anything else. And try and have something lined up what you will do after GGD before you start GGD.

Coming up next: GGD Blog goes in depth into some of the 'issues' (yes another euphemism) particularly the problematic research methods...

Some good news to pass along...

Thanks to an informant in the this year's GGD, have the following figures to share:

This year the programme is 25 people, up from 15/16 year one then 21 year two.

In year three, they had 100-125 applicants.

So assuming their target for year four is the same, they will probably admit say 35-40 expecting 25 to show up.

I had 12:1 odds. You guys have more like 3:1! That's not even taking into account the Global-Financial-Crisis...

Some advice for January applicants

Two years ago I was where you are now. Here are some of the problems I had getting the application in, and what you should be doing.

I've already gone over what you need to put in the application, but here is the (incomplete) list again:

--Statement of Purpose
--Previous results / academic transcripts from undergrad
--2 writing samples
--CV/resume
--3 letters of recommendation

It's pretty hard to mess up a statement of purpose. They're a bitch to write just like a job cover letter, but don't be too creative and try to reinvent the wheel. Oh, read it aloud to someone you trust. You'd be surprised what can pass you by you until you hear it out loud. This sounds kinda stupid but trust me. There is a reason Oxford essay tutorials are done aloud!

Results/transcripts... make sure your registrars office can process this in the time needed. Make sure too you don't owe your old school money. They often hold your official grades hostage until you pay up. I'd aim to have this done in a week of two. If you don't have them on hand now, do it Monday. Really. You have no idea if the person who processes them will leave early for the holiday break.

Writing samples... I'd try and have an academic essay here for Hall and a policy paper or memo or something from the real world for Hunt to look at. Not anything too political. Aim for the centre ground. Make sure to go over your work again too. Your old teacher / boss may have missed something when they went over it in the years past.

CV/resume... I'd use the same one you'd use for a job application or internship.

Now the important one, in my view: the references. I'd have to say this is the most important part of your application. Try and get the people who have agreed to write these for you to actually start writing them NOW. I trusted my referees to do it without nagging from me. Bad idea. I ended up having everything ready to go weeks before the deadline, except the letters.

Letter one: former internship supervisor. Drove two and half hours each way to his office to get the letter done one afternoon two weeks before the deadline. If they don't have the letter for you by the end of December, expect to either have to track them down or have an alternate.

Letter two: retired professor. Sent the letter to his former secretary at the school ''encrypted" (this never actually made sense to me...) over e-mail instead of a paper letter. Took the school IT department a week to decrypt it for me (during a vacation no less). Gave me some stress but it worked out for once. Remember no matter where you are in the world most educational institutions are closed over the holiday / New Year's period. People have staggered vacations. Yet most people have deadlines on what to do before they head off. Make sure your letter is one of these must do's.

Letter three: finally got this one on the night of the last possible day to send rush overnight. Wow, if they'd been a day later I might have ended up at LSE instead...

Final lesson: you might trust people to write a letter, but not on your timetable. Hell, give them your own artificial deadline and not the official deadline.