Master of Science in Plant Biotechnology and Enterprise

at Durham University United Kingdom

Our one year, full-time MSc in Management programmes are designed to provide you with the tools, techniques, and knowledge to succeed in business.

Our MSc Management (Entrepreneurship) has been developed to help entrepreneurial thinkers turn ideas into action. It could be launching your own idea, developing something in partnership, or investing in new ventures – or perhaps you want to find fresh ways to foster and harness entrepreneurial thinking in a business context. Whatever your aims, you’ll learn in a stimulating and enjoyable environment, guided by experienced academics.

The programme consists of a set of core and elective modules, culminating in a practice-based business project or a research-based dissertation.

Core and elective modules:
You will study:

• Entrepreneurship and the Entrepreneurial Process
• New Venture Creation
• Organisational Behaviour
• Strategy
• The Entrepreneur's Environment
• Either Strategic Marketing Management OR Business Economics and Accounting

This degree balances fundamental knowledge and practical application in order to provide you with both specialised and transferable skills that are greatly valued in the marketplace. The course emphasises from the start both programming and mathematical skills that allow in the later years engagement through your 'Individual Project' with cutting-edge research being done in the department.

Durham’s Psychology and Anthropology Departments pride themselves on excellence in both teaching and research. The breadth of complementary research strengths across the two Departments means that you are guaranteed to be taught by staff who are actively engaged in the interaction of psychological and anthropological approaches, and are leading figures in their field of research.

In Anthropology, you will use perspectives from human biology, cultural evolution, animal behaviour, and human evolution to illuminate inquiry into the mind and behaviour of past and present human and primate populations. You will learn how anthropology and psychology provide complementary and contrasting perspectives on what it is to be human, as well as a variety of quantitative and qualitative ways of addressing major questions. The interface of anthropology and psychology explicitly integrates intercultural, international and global issues. For example, in anthropology’s traditional focus on cultural diversity and the burgeoning recognition of psychology’s need to address cross-cultural issues and move away from studies biased by Western Educated Industrialised and Rich (WEIRD) samples.

The degree provides the opportunity to develop extensive subject-specific, interdisciplinary, and transferable skills. The course follows the British Psychological Society(BPS) guidelines with an extensive range of options in the final year, drawing both from work in fundamental scientific research and in applied areas of psychology and anthropology. You may choose to take modules that deepen your understanding of a smaller number of anthropologically and psychologically relevant topics or choose to take a more broad and varied selection. Several coherent pathways – for example in animal behaviour, infant and child development, and health – are possible, using complementary modules from the two departments.

Excellent research facilities are available, including a virtual reality suite, developmental testing facilities, and EEG labs (in psychology), as well as extensive collections of fossil hominin casts and material culture artefacts from around the globe, a sleep lab, hormone lab, and field station for primatology in South Africa (in Anthropology). You are encouraged to get involved in research being carried out by your lecturers, thus gaining a deeper and more hands-on understanding of the issues you are learning about in your degree, and adding to your contextual experience.

The MA in Visual Culture at Durham is a distinctive interdisciplinary course that invites you to develop your knowledge and understanding of the visual arts and of visual culture. To study visual arts and culture is a way of paying attention to phenomena that are everywhere. The concept of ‘visual culture’ acknowledges the pervasive nature of visual phenomena, and signals openness towards both the breadth of objects and images, and the range of theoretical and methodological perspectives needed to understand them adequately.

Drawing upon research strengths across the departments that contribute to the course, the MA in Visual Culture encourages a broad geographical and chronological scope, while allowing you to engage with a wide range of visual phenomena, including fine art, film, photography, architecture, and scientific and medical imaging practices.

The importance of critical visual literacy in the contemporary world cannot be exaggerated. ‘The illiterate of the future’, wrote the Bauhaus artist and theoretician László Moholy-Nagy, ‘will be the person ignorant of the camera as well as of the pen’. This observation was made in the 1920s, when photography was first used in the periodical press and in political propaganda. The rich visual world of the early twentieth century pales in comparison with the visual saturation that now characterises everyday experience throughout the developed societies and much of the developing world. But the study of visual culture is by no means limited to the twentieth century. Turning our attention to past cultures with a particular eye to the significance of visual objects of all kinds yields new forms of knowledge and understanding.

This degree will equip you with the skills to understand religion and its power to shape the human condition This degree is designed to develop an understanding of the centrality of religion to the functioning of societies past, present and future. You will engage with the comparative study of religion, especially with the significance of myth-, ritual- and meaning-making. This is complemented by more specialised modules that explore religious practice in relation to either particular religions (such as Islam, Judaism and Christianity), particular regions (such as Asia, Africa, and Europe), or particular transnational media (the internet, film and literature).

You will engage with the role of religion in a wide range of contexts: including politics, literature, bioethics, and war. Students on this degree will benefit from the considerable strength that the Department has in the comparative study of religion, the social sciences and the study of religious texts/artefacts.

Graduates of the degree will be highly employable in a range of professions including the civil service, education, research and social work.

The degree enables you to understand better the world we live in, and to explore the forces that shape your own attitudes, hopes and fears. In turn, it will empower you to go out into the world to make a difference for the good.

Our taught MA pathway in Romantic and Victorian Literary Studies offers choice, flexibility and the opportunity to specialise within this field. You can learn from the rich variety of research expertise in the Department and you also have the chance to concentrate on a particular area of literary study within the field. Our commitment to research-led teaching means that students are able to explore the cutting edge of the discipline - from Romantics legacies to the representation of women in Victorian poetry and painting, to critical theory. We provide an intimate, dynamic and supportive environment for students of all backgrounds and nationalities.

Our course offers up-to-date training in research methods and skills. You will choose three modules, at least two of which are from within the pathway, and you will write a dissertation on a subject related to Romantic and/or Victorian studies.

The BEng Electrical Engineering degree is a high-quality three-year degree designed to offer you the knowledge and skills necessary to join engineering teams on graduation. It is complementary to the four-year Durham MEng, and transfer is possible between the courses up to the end of the second year. It is important to highlight that you also can transfer between the different Engineering programmes that we offer (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Electronic, etc.) up until the end of the second year, provided that you meet the relevant progression requirements. We believe that students should make an informed decision about their futures and allowing our students to transfer between programmes, once they understand the different disciplines, demonstrates our commitment to this and the Department’s General Engineering philosophy.

In the first two years, the BEng covers the same broad base of engineering education as the MEng degree. The BEng prepares you for an exciting career in modern engineering, with the flexibility to respond to changing technologies.

This course provides you with systematic knowledge and the tools to critically review the complex relationships between government and society at a variety of levels and in different contexts. It also enables you to evaluate in a sophisticated and critical fashion, theories and paradigms within the broad field of politics and international relations, and to draw lessons from empirical studies involving both quantitative and qualitative investigations.

It also aims to develop your ability to deploy research strategies and methods in an appropriately advanced fashion to critically evaluate research at the current limits of theoretical understanding, and to equip you with the ability to master complex political concepts and evaluate the significance of major developments in political thought in general as well as international relations theory.

This course provides you with the systematic knowledge and intellectual tools to critically review developments in the theory and practice of international relations. It will enable you to evaluate in a sophisticated and critical fashion concepts, theories and paradigms within the broad field of international relations, drawing lessons from empirical studies involving both quantitative and qualitative investigations.

You will develop the ability to deploy research strategies and methods in an appropriately advanced fashion to critically evaluate current research and advanced scholarship. Each study route aims to provide advanced knowledge and understanding of the dynamics, including cultural and local political and ideological factors, which shape the contemporary international relations of the relevant area.

The course also provides an opportunity for studying international relations in comparative and historical perspective taking account of regional specific political and economic factors.

The course is designed as a research preparation masters. It is intended to encourage you to be intellectually ambitious by inducting you into a community of historians. It invites you to understand the relationship between your own specialist field and the historical discipline in general as well as to communicate with wider audiences. You will feel sufficiently confident in your own disciplinary identity and mastery of the subject to be able to converse with those in other fields.

The course is taught with an emphasis on disciplinary training supplied by the Department’s subject specialists with expertise in an outstanding range of areas (Europe, Britain, North America, Africa, China and Japan) and interdisciplinary engagement, while offering opportunities for supported independent study. You will be able – and are indeed encouraged – to access and use Durham’s exceptional cluster of libraries, archives, and special collections.

All students on the MA in History are required to take the team-taught core module Themes, Reading and Sources (30 credits) which runs throughout Michaelmas (Autumn). Depending on whether you opt for the 60-credit Dissertation pathway or the 90-credit Dissertation pathway, you will also take either 3 or 2 optional modules (each worth 30 credits) which run either in Michaelmas or Epiphany or throughout both terms. The options may also be language, skills and content modules, provided by other centres, courses and departments with the consent of all parties concerned. All these elements have embedded within them a range of content, subject-specific skills, and key skills.