Jolly old England (BBC)

[marnanel]

Originally posted by SteveDallas

Cane her!! Cane her!!

Sorry. Anyway, awhile back I read a book called "Looking for Class" by Bruce Feiler, about his experiences doing graduate work at Oxford and Cambridge. If it's an accurate portrayal, then the whole graduate curriculum there is MUCH MUCH more informal and less structured than in the US.

From my experience of postgraduate research at Cambridge, it doesn't sound too inaccurate: it's a little more structured than "here's a library card, come back when you have a thesis" but not all that much. You do have a meeting with your supervisor once a week, so you can obviously sort out any questions you have there; however, it's a bit harder IME to nail questions at a more meta level with that sort of arrangement. Rather sink-or-swim, really.