While choosing the right university for you is always contingent on having the right course and modules available, what a lot of us often overlook is the manner in which classroom teaching is conducted in the UK at the postgraduate level. I, for one, was bewildered to find a timetable where I only had classes for two days a week, which were two hours long and were classified as a “seminar,” something I had never previously encountered or heard of. To avoid the catching up I had to do in my first few weeks here, below is a brief outline of what lectures and seminars entail, along with a short guide on how you might prepare for them.
Lectures
Lectures are something most of us are familiar with in our home countries. It involves a subject expert imparting knowledge about a particular topic, where they are the main speaker in the classroom. They are typically about an hour long. However, UK postgraduate degrees are highly research-intensive. While the principal speaker may be your lecturer, you are expected to read up on the topic beforehand and gain a working knowledge of it to contribute to classroom conversations. Lectures are generally more constricted in scope than seminars (their freer counterpart). Skim through the texts in the reading list well, and you will be good to go!
Seminars
Seminars might not be something you have encountered before because they require a more advanced critical engagement with reading materials than you are expected to have at an undergraduate level. They are around two hours long, but not to worry, you are given a break in between! Before a seminar, you are not only given an exhaustive list of readings but also a set of discussion questions/topics for class. Your seminar tutor will ask you to divide yourself into small groups of 2 or 3. The discussion is then divided into segments where each segment focuses on one particular aspect of the topic.
The primary difference between a lecture and a seminar is that in the latter, it is the students who spearhead the conversation; the tutor simply points the direction in which they want it to flow in the form of a question. After a question is asked, you are given some time to discuss it with your group and then share it with the class. The tutors are more interested in hearing your thoughts, perspectives, and criticisms on the text than in sharing their own. Seminars teach you how to critique, which is crucial for your dissertation. You are therefore expected to have thoroughly gone over the listed readings and have prepared notes on them to argue your point in class. They are more unstructured and wider in scope. It is a really good space to share your opinions and have your peers agree to/add/counter them. Cleverly interacting in a seminar can help you become an excellent researcher in the long run.
No matter how daunting it may sound, transitioning and adjusting to this new form of studies can be made a lot smoother if you know exactly how to organise your schedule and the right technique of getting the most out of your reading materials. Here are a few tips I found helpful during my time here:
- Start early – Your reading lists for the whole semester should be updated by the start of the semester. The best way to avoid being intimidated by the number of readings is to get ahead of them in the first few weeks before assessments begin. Finishing up readings in advance also gives you an edge in class, where you can easily link how the current lecture/seminar links to the next one, allowing a more holistic and advanced understanding of your subject area.
- Know your field – At the Master's level, you are expected to be capable of answering basic state-of-the-field questions. This includes important researchers in the area, landmark breakthroughs in criticism, and yet unanswered research gaps, to name a few. It is essential that you are able to place your arguments within the wider critical conversations in the field at this stage.
- Research articles – Reading and understanding a research article can be a tedious task if you do not know exactly what you are trying to infer from it. Before each class, you will be expected to read quite a few of them, and while making notes, you can feel really lost because everything might seem important. The best way to grasp what a paper is trying to say is to divide your findings into four subheadings, which gives you ample scope to also show your critical prowess. These are: argument, strengths, weaknesses, and gaps. While the first will be directly mentioned in the paper, the last 3 require you to exercise your own understanding and wider knowledge of the topic. And when you engage this rigorously with an article, you are bound to retain everything important in it for future use.
- Corroborating questions with evidence – If you have the discussion topics listed ahead for your seminars, it might be worth your time to see which particular theorists you can cite in class to support your viewpoint. You can therefore also make a note of pertinent quotes from your reading lists in addition to the subheadings mentioned above.
- Taking and revising notes – Note-taking is not a new activity for any of us. However, at a postgraduate level, lecturers and seminar tutors might mention multiple books and theorists you have never heard of before who are relevant to your field. It is your responsibility to look them up and see if they are at all helpful to your line of research. Since a Master’s course is generally just 1 year long, you need to start thinking about your dissertation topic early, and reading widely can assist you in doing just that.
- Utilise office hours – All UK professors have office hours (ranging from 2 to 4 hours per week) where they are available on campus to discuss anything with you. They welcome students who want to talk more about what they might have taught in class, or more generally, about anything they have research expertise in that you might be interested in too. Go over faculty profiles on the University webpage and make a note of the people you might want to talk to. Drop an email to them when you come here, and they will be happy to accommodate you in their schedule.
Making the most of your degree in the UK not only requires you to have a knack for both reading and research, but also to make the most of the help that is provided to you by professors. Never hesitate to let them know if you do not understand something or disagree with them. I have seen my professors take notes when students are speaking because here you are treated more as peers who have something equally important to contribute in class, rather than as inferior scholars. Thus, as long as you choose to study something you enjoy, you are going to love the way teaching is conducted here.