What to Expect - Lectures, seminars and tutorials

At Durham, like in most universities, the teaching you receive is split up into three separate components: lectures, seminars, and tutorials. Although these can be incredibly rewarding and worthwhile learning tools, certain aspects of them can seem a little overwhelming, especially if you’re not used to the intensity or the wide scope they often involve. This section provides a basic breakdown of each of the formats, alongside a few difficulties you may encounter.

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LECTURES – perhaps the nicest, most frequent of the three, lectures are the closest you will come to traditional school methods of teaching. They are generally professor-led and low-interaction.

Lecturers will set you relevant reading/work before each lecture to help guide and focus your studies. Though it’s definitely helpful, don’t feel like you have to have completed the reading before you attend the lecture – afterwards is fine! The best thing about low-interaction learning is you can take notes and work out the finer details later – no one’s going to be examining your knowledge on it then and there. If you’re an arts and humanities student, you can even use the lectures to work out which topics you find most interesting and plan smart for your exams.

Lectures are often general overviews of or introductions to a subject. Don’t be worried if you leave feeling you haven’t covered a subject enough in depth – that’s what tutorials and seminars are for.

Many lectures are fast-paced, so find a quick method of note taking that suits you. If you type faster than you write, bring a computer. If you miss a few important bits (or, for that matter, the entire lecture), the university’s lecture capture technology, Encore, means you can go back over it in your own time. However, not every lecturer uses this technology - make sure to check whether your lectures are recorded before relying on Encore.

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TUTORIALS/SEMINARS – Typically an hour in length, tutorials are much smaller and much more interactive than lectures. They’ll focus on a topic already covered in the lecture hall, and handle some of the finer details, applications, and discussions omitted previously. Seminars are very much the big sisters of tutorials, lasting 2-3 hours each. It’s quite common to get solely seminar-based modules in second and third year, but that’s something to worry about later.

Completing the set reading/work before attendance is much more important in tutorials than in lectures. You’re either going to be in deep discussion with your peers or working your way through the questions of your tutorial leader, so prior knowledge is key. Although in some subjects (i.e. English) you might be able to scrape through with a general SparkNotes summary and skim reading of the assigned text, in others (i.e. Maths) you may be given homework sheets to complete beforehand.

Tutorials can vary wildly depending on who leads them. Don’t be alarmed if the first person you have is super hard-core, and, equally, don’t assume every tutorial will be a relaxed chat.

Tutorials are not recorded, so if you hear something helpful don’t forget to write it down. This being said, tutorials generally require fewer notes than lectures.

Don’t feel pressured to talk at the expense of your mental health. If you’re not feeling up to participating in the discussion that day (or ever) then taking a backseat and listening to others is completely fine. Most lecturers won’t make you talk if you don’t want to, and if they insist, a note from welfare or the disabilities services should stop them in their tracks.

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PITFALLS AND IMPOSTOR SYNDROME – although it’s not a pleasant thing to discuss, impostor syndrome is not uncommon for working class people to encounter in academic spaces. A lot of the people you study alongside will be from private or grammar schools, and often they will have been taught to flourish in the intellectual spheres you may find yourself uneasy in. This isn’t a reflection on you or your intelligence at all, and it certainly doesn’t mean you have to play catch up – it just means that you need to get good at telling yourself your work is enough.

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LEARN HOW TO DECODE RHETORIC. Imagine this: you’re an arts and humanities student sat in a tutorial, listening to a person deliver their assessment of the assigned reading. Your heart sinks a little bit more with each word leaving their mouth. From what part of their brain did they conjure that up? Does everyone else have ideas like this? Are you even sure you fully understand what they’re saying?

The answer is yes to the last two questions, and as for the first – well, we’re not neuroscientists. If you ever find yourself in a situation similar to the one described above, take a moment to process what the person’s said and boil it down into clearer language. You’ll find that often what people say isn’t half as complex as it sounds. At the root of it, their ideas are no better than yours, and quite often you may even detect the infamous spark-notes summary behind it.

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NO SYLLABUS? NO PROBLEM. Certain students might have more cultural capital than you, and that includes knowing more about areas on the periphery of your subject, or even just other non-degree related areas of knowledge. This can seem incredibly daunting, especially if you combine it with the aforementioned rhetoric. But you’ve got to ask yourself: so what? People may seem like walking encyclopaedias. Good for them. But did you come here to learn the total length of the British-Indian railway? Are you going to be quizzed on James Joyce’s bedtime habits, or what Rutherford’s pet iguana was called? If the answer is no, then it’s okay not to know. It doesn’t undermine your academic ability, and it’s certainly not going to change your grade. If you think about it, there’s probably 50 billion equally inconsequential things you could talk them under the table with any day.

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LECTURERS HAVE OFFICE HOURS. If you’re having doubts about any part of your course, your lecturers are only an email away: drop them a message, or swing by their office hours for a chat. An important thing to remember is that these hours are designed specifically for student queries. You’re not inconveniencing your lecturers, and your peers are happily making use of them whenever necessary. Asking for extra support is not being selfish. It’s also good to remind yourself that your lecturers were once undergraduates too – they encountered more than their fair share of difficulties when studying, and there’s no stigma attached to not being 100% certain on an idea. They’re going to be pleased by your eagerness to understand, not silently judging you.

Jazmine Bourke (2018), ed. Frank Simpson (2019)