Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Film and Media Studies with Placement Year

at Manchester Metropolitan University United Kingdom

The impact humans make on the environment has never been so significant, so pressing or so high profile. Governments, researchers and private organisations are still grappling with the potential solutions for global challenges. Our MSc Environmental Practice provides an answer. It’s your chance to look beyond the headlines and explore the scientific, political and practical realities of protecting the environment.

This course is suited to those looking to enhance their environmental science or management backgrounds, and also those from other backgrounds looking to move into the sector and complement their skills with environmental science and with environmental management aspects.

As such, you’ll cover a diverse range of units throughout the course. On one hand, you’ll develop skills in assessing, monitoring and modelling pollution in the air, water and land, as well as measuring ecosystem degradation. On the other, you’ll learn to apply environmental management tools, impact assessment procedures and carbon management methods.

Finally, you’ll also learn about sustainable development principles and environmental policies – and how to evaluate their implementation. This mix of policy, practice and science will take you from the classroom to the field to the lab. While you’ll develop desk-based assessment approaches, explore key concepts and analyse evidence in lectures and seminars, understanding the environment means getting out into the environment.

So, as well as various opportunities for field trips, you’ll get out into the field for a residential course where you’ll conduct an interdisciplinary environmental assessment. To help you develop your practical skills, you’ll learn in an altogether more cutting-edge environment – with high-spec teaching and research labs equipped with state-of-art analytical and computing equipment.

English and journalism have long been a strong partnership. Today, with the multimedia element, our Joint Honours Degree puts a modern spin on this most enduring of relationships.

This exciting course offers the chance to bring the former together with an up-to-the-minute, multimedia version of the latter, reflecting the demands of the modern media environment.

Today’s journalists are expected to operate across broadcast, print and online networks. With a broad range of units, we’ll give you all the skills you need to compete in this fast-moving world. You’ll learn from accomplished reporters and editors, drawing on extensive newsroom experience to give you industry-relevant understanding and insights.

You’ll also build a set of complementary skills through our range of English units, including critical and cultural theories, and textual analysis. Then when you get to your final year, you’ll have the chance to put those skills into practice – by tackling a substantial piece of project work, whether a portfolio of journalism or an extended piece of critical writing.

Along the way, you may have opportunities to study abroad and, if you wish, to do your third year as a placement - in Britain or abroad. You will be based in a lively department that is staffed by internationally renowned writers and critics, and there's a strong research culture, creating a learning environment that is both supportive and intellectually challenging.

Manchester has one of the biggest digital and creative sectors in the UK. With MediaCityUK, home to the BBC and ITV, it’s an ideal place for an ambitious journalist to build a network, gain experience and boost your career prospects.

Creating art for games is both specialised and rewarding – a mix of technical know-how and creative thinking that can make a huge impact on the look, feel and experience of any computer game. A game artist can create entire living and breathing virtual worlds, dynamic animated characters and beautiful atmospheric effects in one of the most challenging and exciting roles in the creative industry. Our BA (Hons) Games Art course offers this mix, with core skills and vital understanding that will equip you for your future career in the games industry.

While it’s a specialist course offering a specialist skill set, being part of the School of Digital Arts (SODA) offers the unique opportunity to work with others from across our broad creative community. By working in collaboration with students of photography, animation, sound design and more, as well as students from the Department of Computing and Mathematics, you’ll get a taste of the kind of cross-disciplinary teamwork that’s essential in the fast-moving digital sector. It’s not only a creative environment, but a well-equipped one too. SODA has been purpose-built to develop industry-standard skills, so it offers industry-standard facilities – giving you every opportunity to get to grips with professional-grade development and design technology.

Just as SODA provides a vibrant, dynamic environment for studying games art, Manchester provides an exciting, creative setting. The city is not only home to one of the largest media and creative sectors outside of London, but also has a rich history of video games creation, from Ocean Software in the 1980’s to TT Games and much more today. On our doorstep, you can find renowned CG, visual effects and VR/AR agencies like Flipbook and Carbon Digital, not to mention the BBC’s entire digital and games teams. In short, it’s much more than an exciting city for students, for qualified, well-rounded game artists, Manchester can provide the perfect launch pad for a rewarding career.

Placement options

SODA Placement Year
As part of your studies with SODA, you will have the chance to take a year working on placement within the industry. During your year, you will spend at least 36 weeks working within an organisation in the industry, developing workplace skills, practical understanding and genuine industry experience.

This course rethinks the use, practice and industry of Textiles within the 21st century. It is responsive to an emerging global landscape that requires, sustainable, design-led, innovative positions to be adopted from which to anticipate and forecast our Textile futures.

Manchester and the School of Art have been at the forefront of textiles innovation since the late 19th Century and this course is built on that rich heritage, offering students the opportunity to challenge and innovate in equal measure.

As a student, you will develop innovative study hubs of interdisciplinary expertise, which will both rethink and regenerate textiles within its expanded field (including Textile Craft, Innovation and Digital specialisms). You will address the future paradigms of environmental and social change, new materiality, and the development of 4.0 Textile Industry. Hybrid creative learning environments such as the Manchester Met Digital Lab and specialist Textile facilities support advanced digital learning and making, electronics, 3D printing and multi-media material making practices to be explored.

You will develop individual specialised projects which will become beacons within the expanded field of design. Learning is creative, innovative and interdisciplinary and teaching features design workshops, guest lectures, design events, reading groups, live industry projects and study trips.

The world of business can be exciting, challenging and unpredictable. Strong management skills are in high demand to help teams navigate difficult times and make the most of new opportunities.

Of course, you’ll need to learn the theory and context to build a career as a manager or consultant. But we believe it’s how you apply that knowledge that really matters. This course is all about practical solutions to real-world problems.

Optional internship year

If you choose to take the optional one-year internship, you’ll do so once you have successfully completed your taught units. The internship takes place over 36-48 weeks – you will be supported by our Placement Office, who have extensive contacts with the industry and over 25 years of experience of helping students to find placements.

The Placement Office advertise a variety of opportunities, support and advise on the application and recruitment process and continue to support you whilst you are away from the University.

If you are interested in the way in which we communicate and how it can influence people, studying linguistics will help you unravel how language is inextricably linked to who we are.

Linguistics is devoted to the scientific study of natural language and concerned with how languages evolve, are structured and what they have in common. It also studies how languages are acquired and used.

Our program enables you to develop a sound knowledge of both theoretical and applied perspectives and places emphasis on English, with examples from other languages where appropriate. The core elements of the course teach you about sentence structure (syntax), meaning (semantics and pragmatics), forensic linguistics, and phonetics and phonology. You will also learn about language use and variation in different social contexts, the media, and intercultural settings.

Communicating effectively, critical thinking and developing rigorous analytical skills are valuable skills in the job market and are transferable to various professions.

From the written word to the silver screen, this joint honours course explores the middle ground between two of the world’s most important storytelling forms.

It is a fascinating combination of English literature, with its centuries-old roots, and the relative modernity of cinematic studies. Taught by staff that are internationally renowned writers and critics in a friendly, supportive and intellectually challenging environment, you'll study English literature in all its major forms - prose, poetry and drama - and cinema, in its large and small screen incarnations.

The film modules are grounded in close textual interpretation and the analysis of style, genre, historical context, and the politics of representation. As such, you’ll focus on key film genres, key directors, numerous film movements and national cinemas. With the sheer power, reach, longevity and endurance of American filmmaking over the last 120 years, much of the study of film focuses on 'Hollywood' style cinema, but you’ll also look at less commercial film-making from around the globe, challenging and pushing the medium to its limits.

You may have opportunities to study abroad and, if you wish, to do your third year as a placement - in Britain or abroad. And in your final year, you'll get a chance to explore your interests in depth with a substantial piece of project work that presents a thesis, building on the knowledge and skills you've been developing over previous years.

Our lively department is staffed by internationally renowned writers and critics, and there's a strong research culture, creating a learning environment that is both supportive and intellectually challenging. Manchester is a creative hub, with one of the biggest creative sectors in the UK, and along with our extensive cultural links both in the city and further afield, you’ll be ideally placed to begin building a creative network for the future.

Placement options
The Department of English works closely with a number of local schools and voluntary organisations that give students the opportunity to gain experience in a range of areas, including youth work, education, creative workshopping and video production. These placements are generally on a voluntary basis, though some work in local schools has been waged.

Your introduction to degree-level mathematics will leave no stone unturned, with a broad range of topics including discrete mathematics, linear algebra, calculus, statistics and decision mathematics. And in our high-tech teaching laboratories you’ll learn to program in a mathematical language, using software packages that are commonly used for both commercial and research purposes.

As you progress, you’ll be able to choose from a range of subjects that reflect your interests and career aspirations, culminating in a chance to apply your learning in project work. Typical areas of study include further calculus and linear algebra, numerical methods and modelling, mathematics of computer graphics, number theory, cryptography, operational research, financial mathematics, statistics, machine learning, dynamical systems and group theory.

Placement options

Our BSc (Hons) Mathematics program offers the chance to spend a year getting a taste of professional life. If you choose to go down this route, your degree will take an extra year, with the third year spent working in industry. These optional placements not only give you the opportunity to develop your core skills and experience, but also show employers that you’re ready to get to work. Graduate employers report that students who have been on placement tend to be better organised and better able to apply their skills in a structured way.

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).

BA (Hons) Fashion Design and Technology has an excellent reputation for producing menswear, womenswear and sportswear graduates who combine design innovation with an in-depth knowledge of the technical aspects of fashion design and manufacturing.

The course reflects contemporary industry standards and encourages students to design and develop innovative fashion products and ranges using both manual and digital technologies. Students work on live projects with industry partners and also have opportunity to undertake a placement and/or overseas study combined with a year in industry.

Students have the option to graduate with a Menswear, Womenswear or Sportswear award, by selecting specialist units in year two and three, or they can work across multiple specialisms. However, all students are encouraged to direct their learning towards specialized target markets such as luxury, outerwear, denim, tailoring, performance or lifestyle sportswear. The practical aspects of the course are underpinned by the study of the business and cultural contexts of fashion and consideration of sustainable industry practices.

Students work towards an exit portfolio that showcases their creative and technical skills appropriate to their chosen careers. While many graduates enter design roles, the technical aspects of the program also prepare students for other careers such as pattern cutting, fashion innovation and product development.

Placement options

Employability is at the heart of our teaching. All of our undergraduate courses offer an optional sandwich year route that gives you the opportunity to apply for an industry placement between your second and final year. Or to combine study abroad with one of our partner institutions and a placement. If you choose this route, you will commit to working full-time in the fashion industry during your third year, before returning to complete your degree in your fourth year.

A placement year is an incredibly valuable element of your course as it allows you to apply your university-based knowledge, skills and understanding to your job role. During your placement, you will make your own industry contacts and enhance your CV by gaining real-world industry experience. Around 40-50% of our student cohort take part in a one-year full-time industry placement/study abroad with placement annually.

We have a dedicated placements team with over three decades of experience sourcing and securing outstanding placement opportunities. They will provide you with extensive support and advice prior to and during your industry placement.

Placement or Placement with Study Abroad combined opportunities are available both in the UK and internationally, with students previously studying/working in countries such as Austria, Germany, Norway, Hong Kong SAR, China, Sri Lanka, India, Australia and the USA.