Master of Arts in Fine Art

at Anglia Ruskin University - Cambridge Campus United Kingdom

Performing is at the core of our Drama degree at ARU.

With our BA (Hons) Drama degree, we’ll help you to grow into a confident, versatile and exciting drama practitioner with transferable skills to suit the field you want to work in.

With a strong focus on performance, you’ll get to work on public productions as well as smaller-scale projects, exploring practices from the 20th century onwards and devising your own productions.

We’ll encourage you to create innovative and daring performance practice as you develop expertise in group collaboration alongside your own solo performances. You’ll also get the chance to weight your studies to suit your interests, be that drama practice, specialising in backstage production or even theatre administration.

You’ll follow an experiential 'learning-through-doing' programme and your degree will see you choosing from a range of career-focused optional modules, completing a 100% practical Major Project, and graduating with a professionally produced showreel and portfolio.

As a student here, you’ll develop your technical and production skills in our specialist facilities. Our technical staff will be on hand to offer help and support.

You can also choose to study abroad for a semester, with funding available to help cover the cost.

Closer to home, you can connect with Cambridge’s performance scene through our links to local networks such as Cambridge Arts Network and Cambridge Live. You’ll get the chance to perform in public venues around Cambridge as well as on campus, in the Mumford Theatre and Covent Garden Studio.

Experience being part of a professional troupe with our very own Community Theatre Company and take the chance to perform and collaborate with other creative industries students.

Our course will teach you the principles of forensic science, from crime scene to court room. Based in our £45m Science Centre in Cambridge, you’ll analyse and investigate a range of evidence in crime scene rooms and the forensic lab.

With a focus on chemical and biological analysis, you’ll find out what that evidence means. We look at ways to ‘read’ data, interpret the results and present your evidence in court.

You’ll get hands-on with specialist analytical equipment, under the guidance of expert tutors. And you’ll learn outside the classroom too, with visits to law courts and a local mortuary, and opportunities to work with local police forces and forensic labs.

Graduate with advanced skills in chemistry, biology and laboratory analysis – ready to start a career as a forensic scientist.As a forensic scientist you'll provide evidence for use in courts of law to support criminal and civil investigations.

Our BSc (Hons) Strength and Conditioning with Rehabilitation degree allows you to focus on the areas that really interest you, gain fitness industry qualifications, and obtain valuable work experience on an optional placement year.

Based in our specialist, accredited labs in the Cambridge Centre for Sport and Exercise Science, you’ll learn how to help people develop their speed, agility, endurance and strength – whether they’re professional athletes training for elite competitions or local clients seeking to improve their physical activity levels. With different equipment at your disposal, you can track, monitor, correct and capture different data on performers to support your learning and development towards your career goal.

You’ll have opportunities to specialise in biomechanics or exercise physiology from Year 2, and to conduct your own research or take a work placement in Year 3.

Supported by our highly-experienced strength and conditioning specialists, sports therapists, coaches, health and exercise professionals and world-leading researchers, you’ll learn how to rehabilitate, recondition, and maximise the potential of sportspeople safely and ethically. There’s the chance to hear from world-leading guest speakers too, through our Excellence in Sports seminars.

Tourism is changing. It’s evolving to reflect consumer demand and the needs of the world around us. You need up-to-the-minute knowledge to launch a career in this dynamic industry.

That’s where we can help. Our course content and teaching are forward-thinking, and will help you acquire real-world business skills.

Together, we’ll explore how the tourism industry is affected by disciplines such as sustainability and economics. Our modules cover project management, financial analysis, marketing, and much more.

Tourism is a global industry and we understand the importance of languages in the sector. As a Business with Tourism student at ARU, you can choose to study French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese or Japanese as part of your course.

As a student at ARU, you’ll get hands-on experience working with local organisations to run events. And you’ll get to travel too, with a range of European field trips and the opportunity to study abroad for a semester.

Don’t count on passive learning. You’ll be involved in practical activities such as calculating your own impact on the environment. And we have Cambridge as our classroom – a place where history and culture meet 21st-century innovation. Perfect preparation for your career in tourism.

Develop your individual practice, explore and experiment with new processes and media, and engage with contemporary practice and theory by studying for our BA (Hons) Fine Art degree at Cambridge School of Art.

At ARU, studying Fine Art allows you to experiment with your creativity, explore materials and processes, and discover which media best communicate your ideas.

We encourage creative risk-taking, and you’ll have to the chance to explore many new practices and artistic platforms, including photography, printmaking, performance art, film and video, digital media, installation and site-specific approaches. Take a look at some of our students' work.

Our tutors, who are all professional artists, and expert technicians will be on hand to support you. It’s one of the reasons our course is ranked 7th in the UK for 'Satisfaction with Teaching' (The Guardian University Guide 2020).

Here at Cambridge School of Art you’ll be hands-on in your own studio space from the very start of your course. Our studios are based around our digital and traditional exhibition space, the Ruskin Gallery, and you’ll work closely with fine artists in other years and with students from across our creative community. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll get time, guidance and support from our team of practicing artists, dedicated to your creative development. We’ll support you to experiment with materials and across a range of different media, processes and techniques as you develop confidence and build a substantial portfolio of work.

We learn outside the studio too, with visits to local exhibitions, galleries in London and international trips to centres of contemporary art such as Berlin, Madrid, Amsterdam and the Venice Bienniale.

Throughout the course there are opportunities to collaborate and exhibit your work and it’s a great way to develop professional skills in curating, event management, marketing and promotion.

Our students have recently held exhibitions at Cambridge ArtSpace and created site-specific installations at the Institute of Astronomy, the Botanic Gardens and the Museum of Technology. You’ll also showcase your work in our graduating degree show and, as a (Hons) Fine Art student, you’ll also be considered for our annual Supanee Gazeley Prize, a £3,000 award for the best Degree Show exhibition.

All our students are invited to attend the lecture series run by our Fine Art Research Unit, exposing you to contemporary debates in fine art practice. You’ll also study the history and theory of fine art, giving you a solid grounding for careers in the creative and cultural sector, such as curation, arts administration, or arts publishing and journalism – as well as teaching and education.

With an eye on your future career, you’ll receive ongoing support to find placements and work experience and you can also take an optional placement year.

Social work is about empowering children, families and adults. It’s a complex job that demands a lot of soft skills, such as communication and partnership working.

This challenging yet rewarding career will often bring you into the lives of some of the most disadvantaged and marginalised communities. As a student, you’ll learn how to assess people’s circumstances and needs; measure risk; and set up activities with individuals, families, groups and communities.

Working alongside other care professionals, you’ll plan, provide, review and evaluate services and interventions. You’ll become skilled in problem-solving and communication, and gain a thorough understanding of your legal powers and duties.

We work closely with our Service User and Carers Involvement Group, so you can hear directly from people with experience of social care. And there’s ample opportunity to learn on the job too, with 170 days out on placement.

All of our students do two practice placements. Full-time students will do 70 days in Year 2, and 100 days in Year 3. Part-time students will undertake 70 days during years 2 and 3, and 100 days in Year 4. One of your placements will involve statutory tasks, including legal interventions. Both placements are an invaluable opportunity to learn in the workplace and you’ll cover a range of topics such as engagement, assessment, interpersonal skills, interventions, safeguarding and the appropriate use of authority.

• If you study in Chelmsford, your placements could be anywhere in Essex, including Thurrock and Southend authorities.
• If you're joining us in Cambridge, your placements could be anywhere in Cambridgeshire.
• Part-time students in Peterborough go on placement in and around Peterborough and Cambridgeshire.

We’ll make sure that you get a range of settings to best support your training. It’s likely that you’ll have to travel as part of your placement, so you’ll need your own transport to visit service users in the community, where public transport may not be available.

Our Social Work degree course is validated by Social Work England so when you graduate, you’ll be ready to register as a social worker.

How do our thoughts and feelings dictate our actions? And is there such a thing as the criminal mind?

These are fascinating questions, and psychology and criminology are equally fascinating fields. You might be interested in both, and wondering which area to specialise in. If that’s the case, our British Psychological Society (BPS) accredited Psychology with Criminology degree is made for you.

We start by looking at the main principles of psychology and criminology. Then, in Years 2 and 3, our optional modules give you the freedom to explore your own interests in more depth.

By studying BSc (Hons) Psychology with Criminology at ARU, you’ll learn from expert tutors who are actively engaged in research work. And you can take advantage of our specialist science facilities too, including laboratories for analysing hair and saliva samples, and measuring electrical activity in the brain.

You’ll learn about criminal profiling and how it offers insights into youth offending, gendered violence, genocide, rape, abuse and other types of crime. You’ll look at media representations of crime, and explore social and developmental psychology.

But we don’t just learn in the classroom. There are field trips to places such as the Old Bailey and Auschwitz. You’ll sit in on live trials in Cambridge Crown Court too, and observe the dynamics of the court room.

In the final year of your course, there’s the chance to learn about offending and offender rehabilitation from trainee forensic psychologists. You’ll also complete a major project within psychology – and define your future career path.

Psychology degrees at ARU:

This is just one of the undergraduate psychology degrees that we offer in Cambridge. You can also choose to study BSc (Hons) Psychology, or focus on the field of clinical psychology.

New technologies and changing platforms mean there’s a growing demand for people with the skills to develop creative digital content across social media and many other digital platforms with a specialist understanding of user experience and design and emerging technologies like VR.

Whether it's for businesses, charities, arts organisations and beyond, our BA (Hons) Digital Media Production degree will give you a transferable toolkit to take you on your digital journey. The course will help you develop your artistic vision and technical abilities, while giving you research and analytical skills to strengthen your creative ideas.

As a BA (Hons) Digital Media Production student at ARU, you’ll develop your digital design and visual communication skills. Our teaching staff and technicians will help you explore, and keep up to date with new industry developments, in areas such as interactive design and animation; video production; digital photography; web design; mobile apps; sound design; physical computing; user experience and interfaces; motion graphics; Virtual Reality; 360 film-making and other technologies.

Our studio-based MA Fine Art course provides an opportunity for you to further explore, test and challenge your creative ideas in a supportive, professional environment.

The programme reflects the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art practice/s, facilitating the exploration of a range of approaches, including, but not limited to drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, moving image, digital media, installation, sound, performance, social and collaborative practice.

By engaging with contemporary critical issues and with how artistic practices are understood in the 21st century and across different contexts, you will be encouraged to experiment, take risks, shift expectations and to strengthen the motivation, direction and ambition of your practice.

Full-time students are normally offered a dedicated studio space, while part-timers can access the studios as a shared work-base. Other facilities include printmaking, 3D/sculpture workshops, photography darkrooms and computer suites for video production and digital imaging.

With our Masters degree in Fine Art, teaching is primarily through one-to-one and group tutorials, seminars, workshops and studio critiques, in which you will learn about recent theories, contexts and practices.

You are also encouraged and expected to develop your work and research independently. You will be supported by teaching staff who are themselves experienced artists, working across different disciplines.

Our Fine Art Research Unit series of talks – and other specialist talks across ARU – let you hear invited artists, PhD students and staff talk about their work and engage in debates about contemporary art practice.

You will also benefit from links we have with external arts organisations, galleries and exhibition spaces, both in Cambridge and further afield. As London is only a short train journey away, we encourage you to visit relevant exhibitions and events in this important artistic centre. In addition, we promote student participation in open and prestigious competitions and prizes.

Explore the causes of crime, the effectiveness of punishment, and how crime and victimisation are represented in the media.

In doing so, you’ll challenge your existing opinions. You’ll also develop skills in evaluating contrasting evidence, critical thinking and crafting arguments by learning how sociologists, psychologists, political theorists and law experts approach crime and complex social problems.

Our BA (Hons) Criminology course places value on hands-on learning. We learn through case studies, the latest research and interactive sessions. There may be field trips to courts, prisons and sites such as Auschwitz.

We have a supportive community of staff and students at ARU. Throughout your BA (Hons) Criminology degree, you’ll benefit from one-to-one personal tutoring and dedicated Criminology social media groups.

Together, we’ll explore the causes of, responses to, and media representation of the most relevant crimes of today. These include violence against women and girls, crimes of the powerful, opportunistic crimes, war crimes, corruption and urban culture.

You’ll prepare for your future career from the first semester: building a portfolio and CV, attending volunteer and employment fairs, taking part in our annual Criminology conference, and hearing from key figures in criminal justice debates and the authors of important criminology texts.

What’s more, our links to local and national organisations give you the chance to gain work experience, and lay the groundwork for your final-year research project.