Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Computer and Data Science

at Birmingham City University - City Centre Campus United Kingdom

Whatever your interests, our Musicology course gives you the unique opportunity to pursue your own research project within a lively and exciting Conservatoire environment.

Our flexible course enables you to mould a programme of study to your own needs and aspirations, and may be approached as preparation for a research degree in music.

It is important that a musicologist also develops complementary skills and/or knowledge outside their specialism which will help equip them for a future career: professional musicologists typically find themselves, amongst other things, teaching, managing and administering; some even maintain parallel careers as professional performers or composers.

Therefore, we provide you with a choice of Professional Development Options (shared across our postgraduate programmes) alongside your musicological work to give you the opportunity to develop and/or expand your interests across a range of complementary areas.

The Conservatoire team—which comprises a large number of research-active staff—has a vast array of expertise, allowing us to supervise a wide range of projects, and we are particularly keen to attract those interested in pursuing Masters-level research in our specialist areas.

The BSc (Honours) Accounting with Business degree at Birmingham City Business School will provide you with the skills, knowledge and expertise that you need to make an impact across all sectors of the global business environment.

We equip graduates with the skills and attributes that will allow them to become future organisational decision makers in the world of business.

Completion of this course can give you the opportunity to gain accreditation from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), providing you follow the CMI pathway in your final year. You will also have the possibility of gaining exemptions from the professional qualifications offered by the major accounting bodies, including the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA).

Our Fashion Styling course focuses on your ability to develop a personal creative style, entrepreneurial abilities and a professional approach.

The course is primarily vocational and practical, and caters for those with career interests in contemporary fashion styling, visualisation and communications.

What's covered in this course?

Throughout the course, you’ll explore and use different research methods to investigate how styling is used to promote fashion through marketing, advertising, events management, publicity or public relations. You’ll learn the skills and knowledge needed for a professional career in fashion styling, with opportunities to collaborate with other fashion students and work on live projects with industry.

Based at our city centre Parkside campus, you will have access to relevant software and computer equipment, and have the opportunity to collaborate with a faculty full of creative students.

Your learning environment will encourage you to become an adaptable, flexible and knowledgeable graduate, equipped to pursue a career in the fashion industry.

Professional Placement option

The Professional Placement version of the course is optional and is offered as an alternative to the standard version of the course.

This will allow you to complete a credit-bearing, 20-week Professional Placement as an integral part of your Master’s Degree. The purpose of the Professional Placement is to improve your employability skills which will, through the placement experience, allow you to evidence your professional skills, attitudes and behaviours at the point of entry to the postgraduate job market. Furthermore, by completing the Professional Placement, you will be able to develop and enhance your understanding of the professional work environment, relevant to your chosen field of study, and reflect critically on your own professional skills development within the workplace.

Are you interested in understanding business concepts and how to use IT to serve business needs?

Our Business Information Technology degree gives you the skills to make IT work for businesses.

Business Information Technology bridges the gap between IT and Business to drive innovation and growth in the modern global organisation. It embeds a systems philosophy of connectivity, to offer an in-depth understanding of business concepts and how to use IT to serve business needs. It will also provide essential skills that will facilitate communicating and discussing technical and business ideas effectively with technical and non-technical audiences.

What's covered in this course?

You will work collaboratively with tutors, researchers and businesses, applying practice-based skills to real-life case studies and live project briefs which will develop your problem-solving and analytical skills. Learn how to think like a coder, to influence the design, development and use of information systems and technology in organizations.

You will also gain an in-depth understanding on how organizations can harness the data to improve decision-making. In a summary, this course will give you the skills and knowledge to make IT work for businesses.

Develop your technical, research, design and organizational ability, and leave with the skills employers want.

Work in our advanced software development and computer programming labs, using dedicated facilities for systems analysis, networking, e-commerce and business intelligence – all of which reflect advanced professional practice.

Do you want to be a design thinker? Is your goal to use a design strategy to transform businesses, cultures, and lives? Alternatively, do you want to develop your own design business? If your answer is yes, then this course is for you!

This course invites designers and non-designers to apply design thinking and business-speak to create innovative and purposeful outcomes. On this course, you sharpen your strategic edge through expanding your entrepreneurial and business capabilities. If you are a non-designer, you learn to be a creative thinker.

You bring the knowledge from your past education and practice, combine them with the subject knowledge of design management, and create solutions that are not just aesthetically pleasing but also functional, viable, and purposeful. The course brings excellent networking opportunities for you to facilitate knowledge building and collaborative learning.

On this postgraduate course, we teach you the interdisciplinary issues that design managers work with, such as business, marketing, technology, and art. Immersed in practice, you acquire the skills and the confidence to manage and lead a project. You are encouraged to push the boundaries and to put forward new, improved ideas that are innovative and purposeful.

Design thinking, design strategy, creativity, research, and problem-solving are applied extensively to all the modules. You undertake projects individually and in a team, where you learn communication, management, and interpersonal skills. You work with industry partners with the utmost professionalism. You pursue an industry-based inquiry, which may be a placement. And, you acquire and apply people management, client management, and project management tactics while working on industry projects and teams.

The world of fashion is one of the globe’s fastest-growing industries, as well as one of the most competitive. This course equips you with the skills and knowledge to succeed as a manager in this exciting industry.

You will gain a technical understanding of the sector, combined with a solid foundation of management principles. We will help develop your overall understanding of the modern fashion industry, as well as the necessary skills for working in the sector.

Professional Placement option

The Professional Placement version of the course is optional and is offered as an alternative to the standard version of the course.

This will allow you to complete a credit-bearing, 20-week Professional Placement as an integral part of your Master’s Degree. The purpose of the Professional Placement is to improve your employability skills which will, through the placement experience, allow you to evidence your professional skills, attitudes and behaviours at the point of entry to the postgraduate job market. Furthermore, by completing the Professional Placement, you will be able to develop and enhance your understanding of the professional work environment, relevant to your chosen field of study, and reflect critically on your own professional skills development within the workplace.

A law degree is an important first step into a career in law, as well as an important foundation on the route to many other careers, and Birmingham City University is a long-established provider of legal education to the Birmingham legal community and beyond.

This course has been developed to enable anyone wishing to qualify as a solicitor or barrister to undertake this first, important academic stage of their career. To achieve this, the course has been designed to align with the subjects that you will need to study further in order to successfully undertake the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE), while also meeting the requirements of the Bar Standards Board for an undergraduate law degree.

What's covered in this course?

The study of law is both academic and practical, and therefore both of these are important elements in the LLB (Hons) degree at BCU. Theory and academic study are important on an LLB, but so too is the application of that knowledge, and so our LLB (Hons) degree offers plenty of opportunity for you to develop the practical lawyering skills, as well as the transferable skills enhancing your employability, that graduates will need when entering the workplace.

The different pathways on the LLB course will allow you to make decisions regarding the direction in which you want to take your studies, with named degrees in Law with American Legal Studies, Law with Business Law, and Law with Criminal Justice, as well as a broad range of optional modules ranging from more theoretical topics through to those aimed at the practical application of the law in real-world situations.

You will also have the opportunity to put those skills to practical use, both in the local community and beyond. Whether that is through our programme of placement opportunities with local providers such as Citizen’s Advice and various legal advice charities, through opportunities in the local legal community, or via BCU’s own Law Clinic, established to serve the local community from our City Centre campus, there are plenty of options available to you.

You can also apply your legal knowledge further afield, through our US internship programme which has been placing students with attorneys throughout the US for over 20 years. A professional placement year is also available, between years 2 and 3 of the degree, offering further opportunity for you to put your knowledge and skills to practical use, and thereby enhancing your CV further.

By focussing on the development of a range of transferable skills, the course employs numerous innovative assessment methods, going beyond the typical forms of written academic assessment.

You are also encouraged to engage in extra-curricular activities to support your learning, with student societies such as the highly successful Mooting Society. Furthermore, you will have the ability to engage with the wider Birmingham legal community through our connections with the Birmingham Law Society, the largest regional law society in the UK.

This course will create graduates with a sound understanding of the theory and practice of AI in industry. As a conversion course we will assume all students are starting fresh with no experience of computer programming and little experience of using mathematics or statistics in their undergraduate programmes or in work.

What's covered in this course?

We will begin by creating a foundation in programming and mathematics upon which we will build the expertise in several key areas of artificial intelligence, going from your first Python code and basic algebra right through to Deep Learning. The core applied areas of data science that will be taught will include:

• Data Visualisation and Interpretation - Analysis that can’t be properly interpreted, explained and understood is a waste of time from a commercial point of view. We will teach you how to generate attractive and interpretable visualizations and tell the story of whatever data you’re working with to a range of audiences.
• Image Analysis - Machine learning has shown incredible results recently in understanding the themes of images and video which are being applied in a range of commercial settings; from security and driverless cars, to online clothes shopping.
• Natural Language Processing - Being able to understand speech and text is one of the cornerstones of artificial intelligence systems. Chatbots built on AI are appearing all over the internet, but more than this technology giants are searching for ways that machines can have detailed conversations with one-another and to be able to read and understand text documents.
• Time Series - Dealing with dynamic data is vital to AI systems in finance, AI and defence; whether predicting the future of stock prices to predicting patient outcomes in ICU and how a virus outbreak will permeate through a population.

Do you want a fashion degree that will enable you to pursue a career within the industry, specifically fashion communication and branding?

Then this course is for you. Its unique mix of both fashion communication and branding will give you the skills you will need to be a creative, confident, well-informed fashion communicator, ready for the industry.

What's covered in this course?

You will be taught by an industry-experienced teaching team and by visiting industry professionals. There is also the opportunity to participate in live industry-based projects and competitions, such as working with Textile View 2 magazine, and L’oreal Brand Storm.

You will develop visual and written communication skills across a broad range of creative media (creative direction and styling, art direction and graphics, print and digital design, branding strategy and journalistic writing) associated with the fashion industry. There will also be the chance to showcase your final-year work to industry leaders, at events such as Graduate Fashion Week in London.

Based at our City Centre Campus, you will have access to photography studios and equipment, relevant software and computer equipment, as well as a faculty of creative students to collaborate with. You can also take part in the international Erasmus exchange program and choose to follow our four-year sandwich option, which features a one-year industry internship.

Want to study both psychology and criminology at University? Our BSc (Hons) Psychology with Criminology degree combines both subjects and allows you to take a year-long industry placement.

Our innovative criminology and psychology course will give you a deep understanding of how the core and specialised areas in psychology and criminology contribute to our understanding of contemporary issues.

You will apply scientific reasoning and evaluate patterns of behaviour, gaining key transferable skills in communication, teamwork and problem-solving. Additionally, you will also learn how psychology can be applied to explain certain aspects of crime and criminal behaviour.

What's covered in this course?

This versatile course provides the opportunity for you to embark on a psychology career, or bring those skills to the domain of criminology.

Over the three years, your Psychology modules will help you gain a deep understanding of one’s mind, behavior and reasons why individuals carry out certain actions, while your Criminology modules will help you understand the relationship between the different aspects of crime and victimisation.

Our focus on contemporary and innovative learning practices will help you gain key employability skills, such as communication, teamwork and problem-solving, as well as key skills in two innovative, intriguing disciplines.