In-person Study Days return to St John’s
After over a year of almost exclusively virtual events, the Access team has spent Trinity Term making up for lost time, welcoming hundreds of pupils to St John’s across in-person tours and Study Days. Whilst it’s been fantastic to expand our digital offering and welcome more pupils than ever onto our online Inspire programmes, we’ve been looking forward to showing pupils around St John’s in person once again. Luckily, for the most part, the sun has come out to greet them!
Particularly exciting has been the return of our Study Day programme in person, which offers high-achieving Year 12 pupils at non-selective state schools an opportunity to experience higher level study in their chosen subject. After several successful events at the end of Hilary Term, we hosted Study Days in Chemistry and Maths & Computer Science during Trinity, welcoming 111 pupils across the two days.
Both days began with welcome talks introducing the relevant subject course at Oxford, as well as tours of College and plenty of Q&A opportunities with tutors and current students throughout the day. During the Maths and Computer Science Study Day, pupils also had the opportunity to attend an interview workshop, including a mock interview session aimed at demystifying the interview process. This proved particularly popular with attendees in the feedback. Pupils were then able to take part in Academic Taster Sessions with our fantastic tutors Professor Stuart White, Professor Jan Obloj and Professor Stefan Kiefer to get a taste of studying at Oxford. This event was supported by the Maths access team, as well as our own lovely students and tutors.
The clear highlight of the Chemistry Study Day was an OxBOX Chemistry session, run and supported by the central Chemistry department. In this interactive session, pupils work in groups to solve a series of theoretical and practical chemistry problems to crack the code to open the box. Attendees were then able to choose between two different Academic Taster sessions led by Dr Josef Boronski, Junior Research Fellow in Chemistry at St John’s, and Bethany Shire, a DPhil Candidate in Organic Chemistry.
In addition to the Study Days, our Access Team also hosted two Classics and Ancient History Study Exploration Afternoons, in celebration of the Classics and Ancient History Essay Competition, as well as an English Subject Exploration Day. Both events were a great success, and were attended by more than 160 pupils in total. After an introduction to either Classics and Ancient History (with a prize giving ceremony for winners of the essay competition), or to English courses at Oxford, pupils on both events attended a variety of Academic Taster Sessions and had the opportunity to chat informally to our current students and tutors.
We’re very proud of the success of our events this term, and none of it would be possible without the hard work of many teams across College, as well as the enthusiasm of our tutors and students. A big thank you to everyone who supported our pupil visits this term – we’re looking forward to an equally successful 2022 academic year!