Felix

I'm 22 now and I'm in my second year of PPE that is a philosophy politics and economics at Harris Manchester. I graduated from High School in 2018, did one year of traveling, internships – all that sort of stuff – and I then started at a German University doing international relations, which I liked very, very much. It was a very good degree, but I more or less spontaneously applied to Oxford: I just decided a couple weeks before the application deadline that I wanted to apply. Quite surprisingly I had a successful application. I was really, really excited, and that's how I ended up here. I did not apply directly to HMC. I initially applied to Balliol, which is just around the corner actually. Had I known about HMC or had it come up during my Google searches there's a pretty good chance I would have applied here directly.

I was very excited about going to Oxford, but I had never heard about Harris Manchester before. It is Oxford's smallest College, and it is also Oxford's only mature College – I think that can make you sceptical at first but that scepticism really dissipated very, very quickly once I came here. When I first came to HMC and I walked in it was really impressive to me – you just walk in through these really old Gates, you see all the flowers, you see the people sometimes studying, mostly having fun, and it's really amazing.

Studying and teaching is a little bit different here at Oxford. I think the main difference that everyone will bring up is the tutoring system. As someone who studied in Germany where you're in a lecture with a professor and up to 800 others or so being in the same room with your professor and maybe one other person or even just you for an entire hour and just talking about your subject sounds either very exciting very awkward or really, really scary, and I think it was a bit of all three for me but after being here for two years I can say it's actually probably the most productive way to study…

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