Jozef Dudek

University College 1997, Physics

I grew up in Somercotes, Derbyshire, a former mining village where these days the big employer is the Thortons chocolate factory. My parents ran a sign-writing business for most of my early life, but then they gave that up and got work as a shop assistant and on the production line in the chocolate factory. Neither of them went to university.



The secondary school I went to had once been a fairly successful grammar school, but had been a comprehensive for quite a number of years by the time that I got there. It was not particularly strong academically, but there was a core of enthusiastic and able teachers in maths and physics. I got good grades, and got on well with many of the teachers – although I also managed to get myself into trouble with some of the staff!



I had never considered applying for Oxford – I just assumed I wasn't up to the standard required. When it came to university applications and I told my teachers where I was applying, though, they asked why I wasn't applying to Oxford and Cambridge – so I went for it. Although my teachers were the ones who encouraged me to apply, they really had no idea about the application procedure or the interview – I pretty much had to work it out myself using the information provided by the University.


Once I applied and got invited for interview, the selection process was in three parts: a maths test, an 'unseen' interview and a second interview on a 'prepared' topic. I found the maths exam interesting to do – it was clearly at the level an A-level student should be able to do, but not quite the usual style of A-level questions. I think I did pretty well on it.

In one interview the tutor asked me to work though a physics problem. When I started to describe it to the tutor he very quickly picked up on the fact that I was just reciting this from memory, and persuaded me to solve the problem mathematically. This was something I hadn't been taught at school. Nevertheless, he dropped a few hints and I started to work out how the solution might go, and very soon we were successfully finished. It was clear he wanted me to try something new and outside of what I'd experienced at school so that he could see how I thought about new problems. Despite being nerve-wracking, working through the problem was actually fun.

In another interview I was given a topic to think about in advance. It felt as though there was a sort of 'good-cop, bad-cop situation' with the two tutors interviewing me, one very enthusiastic about what I was saying, the other constantly pushing me to explain more. I thought it was a tactic they'd arranged, but when I got to know both tutors later I realised that it was just their different personalities. All three people who interviewed me tutored me throughout my course – they were physicists in my college – and I got to know them very well. I still keep in touch with them.


I left the interview convinced that I hadn't done well enough, but it seems I'd shown them what they wanted, and I got a place. When I got to Oxford, I found the first term terrifying. While I was doing fine on the maths, I was a long way behind my contemporaries in the physics. They'd done some of it before, whereas my school just hadn't covered it. I thought I wasn't going to make it after I got fairly mediocre scores on some tests, but things improved rapidly and I finished the first year with a distinction. A lot of this was due to the tutorials, which I had with one other student in my college. These were a great way to encourage you to do the work - to avoid being embarrassed - and to get direct answers from your tutor on those things you had trouble with.


The friendly competition with other physics students in the college helped too. We'd help each other out, but only after we'd tried to solve the problems ourselves. There was a good deal of pride in doing the stuff yourself. In the end I got a pretty good First.



For me, a great aspect of the college system was living in close quarters with people from a wide range of backgrounds studying all kinds of subjects. Coming from a place with a pretty homogeneous white working-class population this was an unparalleled experience, and the friends I made then remain good friends today.



After my degree, I stayed in Oxford to do a DPhil in theoretical physics for three years. After this I went to Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia, USA as a postdoctoral fellow to do research in particle physics. I was fairly successful in this position and when a colleague at a local university left and a position opened up I applied and got the job. I'm now an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University. I teach and do research in physics.

When I was a student I got involved in the Junior Common Room (JCR) committee, which is the student representation committee for the college, and as it turns out JCR politics was a good preparation for faculty politics!



Looking back on my time at Oxford, I wouldn't have imagined in that first term, when I was struggling to catch up with the physics, that I would go on to get good results and become a researcher. Tutorials were central to this – they were a good kind of pressure cooker! I really enjoyed forming that close connection with tutors. The other thing that really stands out for me about my time at Oxford was the enjoyment of being around, and becoming friends with, smart and funny people.