Bachelor of Arts (Hons) Joint Honours in English and History with Placement Year

at Manchester Metropolitan University United Kingdom

Product designers at Manchester Met explore why, examine how, and ask ‘what if?’ We are investigative and critically responsive to human and global needs, developing innovative design-led solutions that connect the consumer experience of products, systems and services. As a product design student, you will be creative with purpose, gaining critical understanding of the emergent issues affecting design across society and culture, learning how to be a designer of products that enhance functionality, interactions and relationships with people and the places we inhabit.

 You will develop essential skills in creative methods, research, design thinking, prototyping and design strategy, applying design intelligence to the creation of new product opportunities and solutions. You will discover how to design products that embrace both traditional and contemporary approaches to production and manufacturing, generating value through the application of materials, processes, and technologies. This course will enable you to produce innovative crafted design solutions and develop the creative and professional skills required to support a sustainable career in product design.

Product Design at Manchester Met builds on the success of our previous programme, BA Three Dimensional Design, which has produced influential and award-winning graduates including designer and architect Thomas Heatherwick, jeweller Ruth Tomlinson and ceramicist Joe Hartley.

Whether your ambition is to help an athlete smash world records, or improve the quality of life for recovering patients, we can give you the tools to achieve it.

Our sport and exercise science degree covers a broad spectrum of themes across sport and health. You’ll build an understanding of the key disciplines of biomechanics, physiology and psychology, and then develop specialist skills and knowledge according to your strengths and interests. You'll also have the opportunity to spend an extra year expanding your horizons, working on a placement in industry.

Study sport and exercise science at Manchester Met and you’ll have the support of our team of accredited sport scientists and experts who work with business, the NHS, government and international athletes. With our network of local sports organisations and health providers, you’ll have plenty of great opportunities to apply your knowledge and secure work placements.

Placement options

Our sports and exercise science degree 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 one year longer, with the third year spent working in industry. These optional placements not only give you the opportunity to develop your core skills and learn about how a business really operates in your industry, but also shows employers that you’re ready to get to work. We offer a range of services to help you find the right placement, including employer presentations, advice and placement fairs.

This course is at the forefront of production design and manufacturing practices and brings together students from creative and technical backgrounds, to foster original approaches to product design for manufacture. It supports you to explore and develop personal design methodologies and philosophies, and locate these within a deep understanding of historical, contemporary and future design practices, and wider social and cultural contexts.

You will undertake core units, delivered by production design specialists, consisting of design theory and practice lectures, material and manufacturing workshops, group seminars, individual tutorials, live external projects, and research study trips. Practical design development is supported by extensive hand and machine workshops for wood, metal, ceramics, glass and plastics, and digital workshops for laser cutting and large scale CNC routing.

Optional units facilitate innovative cross-disciplinary opportunities, supporting the development of collaborative working with students from within the material making and manufacturing cluster of MA/MSc/MFA Craft and MA/MSc/MFA Textile, and across the wider postgraduate design community. There are cross-faculty options to study within the faculty of “Science and Engineering”, acquiring advanced 3D CAD skills for industrial production, and utilising the latest advanced 3D printing processes. The Manchester Metropolitan Business School option addresses commercial aspects of design, enabling students to locate their ambitions within a defined financial model.

You will able to explore and challenge all aspects of product design, embracing opportunities for innovation across markets and production levels, from one-off making and batch fabrication, to flexible digital manufacture and high volume industrial production.

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.

Our human biosciences degree combines academic theory with applied practice. You’ll develop a broad understanding of the human biosciences and their significance in the contemporary world – and how you can apply that knowledge in the workplace.

You’ll study human function and structure in depth, the causes of abnormalities in humans and the consequences of human action. Typical areas of study include human physiology, cells and molecules, human neuroscience, and infection and immunity. In our specialist laboratories, we’ll also train you in the various scientific techniques used to study human biology.

Group study brings vital teamwork and communication skills, while in your final year you’ll get the chance to focus and develop your academic interests through an independent piece of laboratory-based research or a dissertation.

The degree will also launch you on a professional path and by the time you’ve finished you will have partly met the academic and experience requirement for membership of the Royal Society of Biology and Chartered Biologist (CBiol) status.

Placement options

The course offers real flexibility, as you will enrol on the three-year course and then decide if a placement is right for you once you have started your studies. If you opt to undertake a placement, your course will normally be four years full-time. Placements are not guaranteed or included as part of the course, as you would be required to source your own placement if you would like to undertake one.

Banking and finance are not only central to the country’s (and the world’s) economy – they also offer a diverse range of opportunities for your future. Whether you’re considering a career in personal banking, wealth management or corporate finance (to name but a few), our BSc (Hons) Banking and Finance program offers the skills and knowledge you’ll need to get started.

You’ll start off getting a good grounding in financial theory and practice, before exploring specialist areas in more depth – from retail banking and corporate finance, to risk management and the industry’s most influential institutions. You can also choose to spend a year working on a placement or studying abroad, developing valuable skills and boosting your career prospects.

Whether you take the three or four-year route – and whatever specialist areas you choose in your final year – you’ll find a practical focus throughout your studies. Not only is everything we teach rooted in real-world experience and expertise, but we’ve designed the course to give you the kind of transferrable skills employers across the industry demand.

Placement options
Our BSc (Hons) Banking and Finance degree offers the chance to spend a year getting a taste of professional life. It not only gives you the opportunity to develop your core skills and learn about how a business really operates in your industry, but also shows employers that you’re ready to get to work.

The business school Placement Team is ready to help. They offer a wide range of services, including employer presentations, advice and placement fairs. But it’s also up to you – the more proactive you are about applying for placement opportunities, the better.

Study geography at Manchester Met and you’ll begin with a good grounding in earth surface processes and landform development alongside society, culture, place and space. With a wide range of options in the later years of your geography degree, you can explore the issues and areas that interest you most.

While we have excellent teaching facilities on campus, we know that some of the most powerful lessons are learned outside the classroom. So, you’ll have ample opportunity to get involved in fieldwork trips around the UK and overseas, helping you develop and refine your practical skills. And, if you take the four-year route, you can spend a year either working on a placement or studying overseas before returning for your final year.

Along the way, you’ll explore key theories and concepts – and how they apply to geographical phenomena – while developing practical skills and techniques through field and laboratory work.

The School of Digital Art's (SODA) Games Art course aims to empower you with the knowledge and skills to create immersive art for games and the interactive experiences of the future. It will explore games art in a range of professional contexts, through interdisciplinary investigations in imaginative concept art, dynamic character design, and immersive world-building. It will synthesise industry-standard tools, techniques and processes with emerging technologies, disruptive research and design thinking.

As a Games Art student you will be part of the School of Digital Arts and will be based within a brand new purpose-built building, equipped with the latest emerging technologies to enable you to develop industry-standard skills for creating and researching content across the latest digital platforms.

SODA is well positioned within Manchester for building a network and developing your research and practice in the media, games and digital tech industries. It is also home to staff from a wide range of disciplines who are research active and experts in their chosen areas. They enjoy well-established links to the wider creative media, arts and digital tech industries in Manchester, nationally and internationally.

The exciting interdisciplinary nature of the course may involve collaborative opportunities with students on other SODA courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, from faculties across the university, such as Arts and Humanities and the Department of Computing and Maths in the Faculty of Science and Engineering.

Supported by guest lectures from international artists, industry practitioners and academics, you will position your work within wider professional and global contexts to develop an innovative, creative practice and research projects.

Designed for anyone with a passion for computer-generated content, our BSc (Hons) Computer Animation and Visual Effects degree will help you learn and hone the skills needed to launch a career in an incredibly exciting industry.

We take a learning by doing approach on this course. So, as well as expert guidance and support, you’ll have access to a fully equipped computer animation suite, with dedicated green screen room, lighting rigs and motion capture equipment. In other words, you’ll have everything you need to learn how to create your own assets for integration with virtual environments and live-action footage to produce complex visual effects.

You’ll learn about creating, rigging and animating 3D models, developing advanced particle effects such as fire, smoke and moving liquids, and about compositing and integration methods. And most importantly, at all stages you’ll have the creative freedom to develop your own ideas and concepts right through to the finished article.

Teamwork is at the heart of this industry and you’ll have plenty of opportunity for team-based study to help prepare you for the world of work. You’ll be perfectly poised to enter this rapidly expanding and exciting digital sector.

Our computer animation and visual effects degree also provides the option of spending an extra year expanding your horizons by working on a placement in industry.

Placement options
The full-time four-year placement route provides the opportunity to go on a placement for at least 36 weeks, where you’ll get a taste of professional life. Completing a placement not only develops your core skills and experience, but also shows employers that you’re ready to get to work. Graduate employers report that students who have been on placements tend to be well organised and better able to apply their skills in a structured way.

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.