Oxbridge College Choice Series, Part 1: What are all the colleges and how do I choose?
Choosing an Oxbridge college
Every student at Oxford and Cambridge (“Oxbridge”) belongs to a college, alongside being a member of the university and of their department. You will be asked to indicate which college you want to apply to and so choosing a college is an important consideration, especially given that it is a place where you might live for multiple years of your life (so it has important implications for your personal life) as well as a place that creates specific educational conditions and opportunities (so it also impacts your academic and professional life). To make navigating this somewhat confusing college system easier, we have prepared a two-part blog series. This article first explains what the colleges are, and Part 2 will provide you with top insider advice on how to choose which one to apply to.
Formal Hall at Clare College, University of Cambridge
What is a “college“ in the Oxbridge context?
The first important distinction to make is that in Oxbridge, college is not a synonym for university, and so the use is not the same as for college in the US for example. In this case, it refers to something that we could describe as smaller institutions within the universities. Firstly, it is a place where you will live, eat and socialise. If you have seen Harry Potter, you can imagine the colleges as the different houses.
Each college has its own accommodation, as well as canteens, bars and libraries, and access to them is typically restricted to the students of that specific college. As a general rule, undergraduate (bachelor’s) students at Oxford and Cambridge are obliged to live in college accommodation (rather than in private housing) - and so choosing the right college for you is especially relevant.
However, at Oxbridge the college system goes much beyond the buildings that you live and eat in. The colleges are also academic institutions. For most subjects, you will share all of your lectures with all other students of your subject across all of the colleges. On top of this, you will also have supervisions (at Cambridge) or tutorials (at Oxford), which are small group teaching sessions (usually in groups of 2-4 students) that go into more depth than the lecture and which require very active participation. Unlike the university-wide lectures, the tutorials/supervisions are typically provided by the college. This means that you will likely have different professors and potentially even a different workload depending on which college you choose and the priorities of your professors and tutors.
You can find a list of all the Oxford colleges here and all the Cambridge colleges here.
Houses at Jesus College, University of Cambridge
Choosing the right college
To give an example, let’s consider Anna, a student applying for medicine at Cambridge. While filling out her application, she will already be asked to indicate her preferred college. Anna, following the 5-step Guide to Choosing a College (which will be in the next article), decides that she wants to apply for an old historical college with numerous funding opportunities and which is in central Cambridge. After visiting some colleges on the open days, she decides to submit an application to Trinity College. This means that her admission interviews will be conducted by professors at Trinity. After Anna is admitted, she becomes a member of both the University of Cambridge and more specifically of Trinity College. Her medical lectures and labs will take place with medical students from other colleges, but she will live and eat at Trinity, which is also where her small-group supervisions will take place.
As you can see, her choice had profound implications for her experience at Cambridge. She would surely have an amazing time at any college, but her day-to-day life would be different at each of them.
