COP2 Module Evaluation

General Thoughts

I have really enjoyed COP this year, it’s been my favourite module on the course so far. I feel like the majority of the lectures this year have been much more beneficial to me. I found The Gaze and The Media, Consumerism, and Globalisation lectures particularly interesting. Given the focus of my essay, I’m sure I would’ve thought I’d have enjoyed the lecture on ethics, but unfortunately I was ill for that one.

The study tasks we’ve been set were really beneficial, the identity theory task really helped me look at things critically, which was something I struggled to do beforehand, and the triangulation exercise forced me to write in a way that triangulates an argument, which is something I’ve been doing innately in my essay since this.

My Performance

Looking back on my module evaluation from last years COP, the things I needed to improve on were commitment, attitude, and time management, and I think that I have improved massively in all three of these senses. I particularly think my attitude in COP has been pretty unquestionable, which is something that I’m really pleased about given my generally poor attitude to the course as a whole last year.

Making an early start on my essay has really benefitted me, because whenever I’ve spoken to Richard or Simon about it, I’ve had different questions to ask, which has resulted in a large amount of feedback. This has really helped the quality of my essay compared to last year. My approach to research has been a lot better this year as well, I found that taking out a couple of books led me to other books, and then it was easy to target areas of research that I didn’t have much content. This ultimately led me to discover Nietzsche, and although I haven’t used his ideas very much this year in COP, I want to base my dissertation around him next year.

Next Year

I’m really looking forward to writing my dissertation next year because it’s about a subject that I’m genuinely interested in. Towards the end of my essay this year I found that I was struggling to say everything I wanted to say in under 3,300 words, and so having the limit upped to 9,000 should give me much more room to enjoy my writing. 

Over the past two years my practical work in COP hasn’t been as good as I would’ve liked, and I hope that the slightly different approach to practical work in COP next year will help remedy this, as doing it throughout the year will mean that I’m constantly thinking about it in the same way that I’ve been constantly thinking about OUGD505 since Christmas.