João Gomes Ramos
Student spotlight details
To help fill the gaps in his historical training for his future PhD, Portuguese lawyer João enrolled on our online Undergraduate Advanced Diploma in Local History.
'My name is João Gomes Ramos, I am Portuguese and I was a student on the Online Advanced Diploma in Local History (ADLH) course, from 2019 to 2020.
'I am a Lawyer in Portugal and I am Master (LL.M.) in International Law and International Relations by the Faculty of Law, University of Lisbon. In the scientific research that I did in the master's degree about the League of Nations and the international legal personality of International Organizations, I had to work with several historical concepts. As I intend to deepen this question in my future Ph.D., I realised that I needed to be better trained with the necessary tools to conduct a historical investigation.
'Having already taken several online courses with the Department and been pleasantly surprised by the way in which they were taught, I’d previously heard about the ADLH Course. I believed that undertaking the course would be essential to fill the gaps in my lack of historical training.
'The teaching method, the organization of all the methodologies of the course, and the availability of the tutor to help with all pertinent doubts prove why the University of Oxford is considered one of the best universities in the world.
'The course is very well structured and organized, and the teaching method used helped me to understand very well the subjects covered and to carry out the proposed challenges. In fact, having followed the instructions of the study materials of the tutors and participating frequently in the chat sessions, I did not notice much difference from the face-to-face classes – I had everything at my disposal to finish the course without problems.
'Regarding the course materials, besides being quite interesting, they are presented in an excellent way. The level of difficulty does increase as the student learns new concepts. Thus, I found that by learning to master the basic concepts of local history, by the end I was able to carry out a final project – a real history project with rigour and scientific methodology.
'At this point I would also like to highlight that the assignments are quite challenging and led me to not only make deeper investigations on certain topics, but they also complement my study by applying the techniques learned throughout the units.
'In this respect, it is also worth highlighting the study of databases that lead me to work, and master, tools of some technical complexity (Microsoft Access) as well as to understand how to collect and analyze data from the material being investigated.
'Looking back, I can say that I learned a lot from the ADLH course. This course provided me with all the necessary tools to be able to carry out a historical investigation with scientific rigour in the future and I will certainly recommend this course to other colleagues. As a foreign student, I can say that I was quite amazed by the quality of the course.'
