Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in English and American Literature with Placement Year

at Manchester Metropolitan University United Kingdom

Studying politics allows you to know what is happening today, how change is enacted, and how you can be a part of it. The principal focus of the degree is power relations between individuals, social groups and nations – so it is one of the most exciting ways to understand why things are the way they are. You’ll study a broad range of social and public policy areas and explore fundamental issues that affect communities in the UK and elsewhere, including: emancipatory political thought and theory, international politics, digital politics, and ‘issue’ politics such as environmentalism and climate change.

The course is underpinned by both the research specialisms of the staff who will teach you and a wide variety of options mean you can pursue your own interests, depending on what you choose to specialise in – with things becoming increasingly flexible as you progress through the course. In the final year, you will engage more directly with current academic debates and contemporary political developments.

We place a heavy emphasis on employability and offer practical skills training, including advanced analytical approaches, which many employers look for when offering placement opportunities. This, alongside the opportunity to study a foreign language or do an exchange abroad, means that a politics degree opens doors to a range of interesting and rewarding career possibilities, as well as providing you with a much better understanding of what is happening right now.

You can also combine politics with another subject and broaden your outlook still further. In your third year, you may have the opportunity to take a placement year with an employer or study abroad, broadening your horizons and boosting your employability.

Placement options

Through a placement year, you may have the chance to spend a year getting a taste of professional life and show employers that you’re ready to get to work. This is a valuable opportunity to develop core employability skills and explore how your course, and the knowledge you’ve gained from it, can be transferred to the real world.

Students are free to choose placement opportunities from a wide range of roles both in the UK and abroad. Students choosing this option are supported by a dedicated placement team who provide links to employers through presentations, events, and fairs, and provide a specialist program of guidance on recruitment procedures including CV and interview preparation, as well as work readiness and working overseas.

Our BEng (Hons) Biomedical Engineering degree offers the chance to harness engineering principles to tackle medical issues. For technical thinkers and born problem solvers, it’s a degree that offers the practical skills and cutting-edge understanding to pursue a future in a highly specialised field.

From start to finish, it’s a degree with a hands-on approach: with us, you’ll learn by doing. Even in the first few weeks, you’ll tackle a team-based design-and-build challenge to help you get settled into the subject. Then, at the end of each year, you’ll finish off with a major project – your chance to turn learning into action.

Along the way, you’ll explore a range of topics – from key engineering concepts, design techniques and digital manufacturing processes, to biological systems, anatomy and physiology – while gaining practical experience of the latest technologies, like 3D printing and rapid prototyping.

The course then culminates in a major individual project, capturing all you’ve learned. It’s not only a chance to demonstrate your professional-standard technological skills, but also a career-boosting opportunity to showcase your work at our degree show. Put simply, by the time you graduate, you’ll have what it takes to make a mark in biomedical engineering – not just for today, but for years to come.

Placement options
Like all of our degrees, this course comes with the chance to spend a year getting a taste of professional life – though placements can be limited, so it’s not guaranteed for everyone. If you choose to go down this route, your degree will take one year longer, with the third year spent working in the industry.

These placements not only give you the opportunity to develop your core skills and learn about how an organization in your industry really operates, but it also shows employers that you’re ready to get to work.

If you do choose to pursue a placement, we offer a range of services to help you find the right one – including employer presentations, advice and placement fairs.

Whether it’s a successful start-up or a blue-chip company, every organization across the globe needs people with strong business skills.

Studying business with law presents you with a world of opportunities. With an understanding of the legal structures that any business has to navigate, you’ll be a valuable addition to many large organizations. With strong business knowledge and skills, you’ll also be ready for a range of management roles in the legal sector.

You’ll learn fundamental skills like team-working, strategy and commercial awareness, get the benefit of excellent industry links and build the entrepreneurial skills that make great leaders, and great careers.

Study Abroad
Instead of a placement, you’ll have the opportunity to spend up to a year overseas, studying with one of our partner institutions across Europe, or beyond. Go abroad in the third year of your degree, and you’ll not only learn about other cultures, improve your language skills and discover more about yourself – you’ll also boost your career prospects. Having first-hand knowledge of another country’s cultures and traditions can take you far in a range of careers. And, by going abroad you’ll also demonstrate the kind of independent spirit and adaptability that many employers want.

Through this one-year course, you’ll develop the skills and knowledge to work as a nutritionist in both the health and food sectors.

You’ll study the theory behind nutritional sciences, exploring topics from food guidelines to biochemistry to the distribution and control of disease. You’ll also have sessions in our laboratories where you’ll complete practical evaluations.

During practical sessions, we’ll help you to understand the assessments you might conduct as a nutritionist. We use patient case studies, so you might complete a nutritional assessment for a patient with Crohn’s disease or diabetes, or perhaps analyse a person’s diet.

Many of our students complete public health nutrition-based projects for their dissertations, focusing on areas they’re hoping to develop a career in. Recent topics include exploring the foodscape and health at population level, how calorie intake might affect the efficacy of chemotherapy treatment, and exercise barriers for young women.

Our MSc Human Nutrition course is an Association for Nutrition (AfN) accredited course. This means that when you graduate, you're eligible to apply for direct entry to the UK Voluntary Register of Nutritionists (UKVRN) Register as a Registered Associate Nutritionist (ANutr).

From ancient civilizations and great empires, to terrible battles and the roots of our modern society, history is a vast landscape to explore and understand.

The past is part of our everyday lives, shaping our world profoundly. Study history and you won’t just learn about what happened in the past. You’ll develop a better understanding of the how and why of the events that make us who we are. In every period we study, our courses seek to develop different approaches and methods to understanding the past, embracing political, social, and cultural history. We foster the practice of history as an inclusive discipline, and recognise that powerful ideologies of race, gender and social status have shaped our past and our present. In other words – you won’t just discover the story, you’ll investigate and interpret its sources, impacts and meanings.

This degree program offers a roadmap for exploring the social and political landscape of human history. You’ll look at a huge variety of times and places – immersing yourself in wars, famine and poverty, charting technological leaps and social progress, and unearthing conspiracies, catastrophes and revolutions. And that’s just in your first year. In years two and three through your option unit choices, you'll have the opportunity to specialise and develop your interests further, and graduate with a degree title that reflects this: Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern, or American.

Staff researchers are constantly searching for new discoveries, fresh perspectives and unknown aspects of our history, bringing the past alive in the classroom. With this degree we give you the skills to understand the world and how this affects societal developments.

You may also have the opportunity to study abroad, including in the US, or spend your third year on placement in Britain or abroad.

Placement options

You may have the chance to spend a year getting a taste of professional life. It is an opportunity to develop core skills and explore how this course can relate to the graduate world, and it shows employers that you’re ready to get to work.

You are free to choose Placement opportunities from a wide range of roles both in the UK and abroad, with the opportunity to take advantage of our connections with local heritage institutions, museums and archives. You will be supported by a dedicated placement team who provide links to employers through presentations, events, and fairs, and provide a specialist program of guidance on recruitment procedures including CV and interview preparation, as well as work readiness and working overseas.

BA (Hons) Fine Art is a studio-based program that provides students with the platform to confidently enter the professional world of the artist and arts professional. Students will actively investigate universal approaches and practices in contemporary fine art that will test their knowledge, creativity and understanding. The program is taught by professional artists that are actively engaged in contemporary practice and will therefore will encourage students to explore the broader social, political and community context to define a personal mode of study that will equip them to continue their development post-degree.

The wide range of teaching approaches, facilities and opportunities will support students to acquire skills and varied methodologies that allow them to either specialise or engage with a pluralistic approach to exploring fine art.  The diversity of content creates a distinctive group of students that engage with and question a divergent range of approaches to studio practice and externally engaged projects.

Students also have the opportunity to develop their practice within an international context through the international exchange program, national and international study trips and the acquisition of foreign language skills. There are opportunities to engage in the contemporary art world through study trips, exhibitions, student exchange programs, visiting artists' lectures, specialist masterclasses and gallery talks at The Whitworth.

Law underpins our society. A law degree gives you a unique insight into everything, from the economy to the criminal justice system. And it gives you a huge range of skills that will last you throughout your career.

The LLB (Hons) is your passport to a rewarding future – whether you have ambitions to be a solicitor, barrister, academic researcher, or a business person.

Discover your niche
We cover all the subjects you need to know; tort, contract, criminal law and property law – you’ll get a thorough grounding in the essentials.

And, thanks to our teaching team’s wide range of specialisms, from families to sports, we offer exciting optional units beyond the core curriculum. Interested in gender issues? We have one of the leading experts on trans rights, Professor Stephen Whittle OBE.

Practise your skills
Mooting is a key part of any legal education. Our mock courtroom is the perfect place to develop your confidence and fine-tune your performance. You’ll have classes and extra-curricular activities there, and you can even use it for your final year project.

Ready to test yourself in the real world? You can work with a qualified solicitor offering pro bono services to local people. You might join the Business Law Café offering advice to local SMEs, or maybe you’ll help someone with legal advice and support they wouldn’t normally be able to afford.

Study Abroad

Instead of a placement, you’ll have the opportunity to spend up to a year overseas, studying with one of our partner institutions across Europe, or beyond. Go abroad in the third year of your degree, and you’ll not only learn about other cultures, improve your language skills and discover more about yourself – you’ll also boost your career prospects.

Having first-hand knowledge of another country’s cultures and traditions can take you far in a range of careers. And, by going abroad you’ll also demonstrate the kind of independent spirit and adaptability that many employers want.

BA (Hons) Interior Design is concerned with the occupation of space, how it is used and importantly, how it is experienced. We promote the understanding and subsequent remodelling of existing spaces, in order to create meaningful interventions.

This course views interior design as a distinct, rigorous practice. Through architectural and design interventions, we engage with collaborative and creative ventures to enhance human interaction with their environment. This can be applied at an architectural scale whilst appreciating the detail and fabrication of objects, surfaces and materials.

The core elements of the course are taught by practising designers and architects, touching on all aspects of interior design such as interior architecture, exhibition design, event /set design or object/element design.

The course advocates the synthesis of this ideology as a creative, rigorous and intellectual process. We value ideas, invention and practical resolution in the creation of new, and often unconventional interior identities. We can create experiential, experimental or functional spaces. We shape environments, generate identities, question programs, detail objects, design or specify materials and furniture.

Placement options

Professionalism is embedded in all aspects of the course through visits from respected professional critics from industry, Live projects and Unit X. Students are also supported and encouraged to seek self-directed work experience in vacation periods. Students have undertaken work experience in Manchester for companies such as Stephenson-Bell, Ian Simpson Architects, Start Judge Gill and Sheppard Robson, and in London for Imagination, Johnson-Naylor, Conran+Partners, Casson-Mann, Virgile+Stone to name a few. Many enterprising students use the vacation to seek work experience abroad and opportunities have arisen in Japan (Klein-Dytham) and Dubai (Paul Bishop Design), Australia and the US.

Explore the person-centered therapeutic process, brief interventions, and different approaches to psychotherapy. Practice core psychological skills, from therapeutic interventions to applied research and consultation. And, reflect on practitioner resilience and self-care.

On this course, you’ll explore the theories behind therapeutic methods related to promoting psychological wellbeing, and develop practical research skills.

You’ll study topics including the principles of therapeutic approaches (such as developing positive therapeutic relationships with clients and person-centered care), therapeutic strategies of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), including cognitive restructuring, and brief interventions, such as solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) and motivational interviewing.

In skills sessions, you’ll complete role-plays and scenario-based tasks to practise core therapeutic techniques, such as reflecting, identifying internal/external frames of reference, and Socratic questioning.

You’ll also reflect on practitioner wellbeing and development. Some of the themes you’ll consider include boundaries and safe practices, privilege and social responsibility, and core values and beliefs.

We’ll help you to develop your awareness of self-care through experiential learning groups based on your experiences and you’ll complete a practitioner log and reflective diary too.

You’ll have the opportunity to complete a service-related dissertation, connecting theory and practice, influencing service design and delivery for statutory and third sector organisations or people with particular vulnerabilities.

At Manchester Met, our teaching team includes practitioner psychologists (clinical, counselling, health and sports) with experience in working in NHS and private settings in the UK and internationally.

BSc Criminology and Sociology with Quantitative Methods offers exciting opportunities for you to combine the study of the cutting-edge disciplines of criminology and sociology in the vibrant city of Manchester, whilst gaining extensive quantitative skills. Joint Honours students are based in one department, the Department of Sociology, which teaches both specialisms.

The BSc Criminology and Sociology with Quantitative Methods course is aimed at students who are interested in both disciplines and want to study the causes, patterns, consequences and responses to crime by situating them in the wider context of society, as well as develop a specialism in quantitative research methods. The first year introduces you to the building blocks of criminology and sociology: key sociological and criminological theories, social divisions and problems, the criminal justice system, crime policy and practice, and key social transformations such as digital culture. You will receive training in a wide range of research methods, both qualitative and quantitative, during the first two years. In the final year, you will focus on quantitative methods for designing, implementing and analysing social and criminological research, and will complete an independent project.