Master of Arts in Architecture and Urbanism

at Manchester Metropolitan University United Kingdom

The Combined Honours program offers you an opportunity to study two subjects at degree level.

English:
English is a well-established humanities discipline, which explores the role of the written word in defining and transforming human experience. The modern discipline of English is rooted in the study of literature and the language in which it is written. Students of English can expect to study all major periods and forms of literature and to learn how to analyse literary texts by drawing on disciplines such as history, sociology and politics. The study of English develops strong critical thinking and communication skills, attributes that are highly valued in humanities graduates by employers. The English department has access to a community of internationally renowned writers and critics through the Manchester Writing School, one of the most successful of its kind in the UK. The Creative Director is Carol Ann Duffy DBE (Poet Laureate 2009-2019). You will develop the necessary skills in critical thinking and communication that are of value to graduates entering a wide array of career paths.

Spanish:
Proficiency in modern languages will give you the competitive edge in the global jobs market. In both the private and public sectors, there is demand for professionals with strong language skills who can work in culturally diverse environments. Studying Spanish at Manchester Met will give you the opportunity to learn from native speakers. Our languages department have created their own multicultural community, including British, exchange and international students, along with foreign language assistants, allowing you to be absorbed into the everyday use of your chosen language.

We have been providing professional language courses for more than 30 years and our staff are nationally, and in many cases internationally, recognised experts in their field. Our strong local, national and global links will help to enhance your study and future employment opportunities.

Whatever the purpose and whoever the user, web design marries the technical with the creative. The pioneers and leaders in this industry over the past 20 years have been both talented developers and left-field thinkers – a combination of creativity and code that has helped shape the modern digital experience.

As a Web & User Experience Design student, you will be part of a vibrant, multi-disciplinary creative community at our School of Digital Arts (SODA). With an innovative curriculum that ignores the narrow limits of any one discipline, you’ll have ample opportunity for collaborating with fellow SODA students – whether they’re studying games, photography, animation or sound design (to name a few). It’s an approach designed to mirror the real working practices within the creative industries, but it also lets you find the cross-over areas and creative directions that interest you most. And, just as you’ll learn industry practices, you’ll also use industry tools – developing your skills in an environment that has been designed, built and equipped with the latest technologies.

More than a purpose-built creative school, we also boast a globally renowned creative setting. Manchester is home to the second-largest media and creative sector in the UK, with a huge range of production companies, digital agencies and media businesses, from national broadcasters to innovative start-ups. As such, it’s not only an ideal city for your education in web and UX, but a perfect place to take your first steps as a professional. Here, you can learn from some of those at the forefront of the discipline, build your network and secure your career in the media, games or digital tech industries.

From early years practitioners, teachers and leaders in education, to local authority, health services and aspiring researchers, our course appeals to a variety of backgrounds and professions. You will be joining a diverse and thriving community of postgraduate students from the UK and across the world.

You’ll examine key concepts, global issues and debates in education, from performance measurement to ethnicity, class and gender. Explore national and international policy, and consider the impact of social inequalities, and the role of politics in education.

We aim to empower you to approach your own research with confidence. You’ll extend your understanding of research techniques, including empirical and desk-based projects, to prepare you for completing your own dissertation. Throughout the project, you will have access to support from active researchers in our internationally renowned Educational and Social Research Institute (ESRI).

We’ve designed this postgraduate course to allow you to specialise and focus on areas of education that interest you. You can specialise by choosing an option unit based on work by world-class researchers in the Faculty of Health and Education. Your option units may include topics such as literacy and language, educational philosophy, learning in informal settings, or international perspectives in education.

When you graduate, you’ll achieve a master's degree that highlights areas of your personal and professional interest.

In today’s digital world there are more ways than ever to reach out to consumers.

Finding creative solutions to advertising challenges is a sought-after skill. It’s not only about crafting attention-grabbing images and slogans. Your campaigns need to be grounded in advertising theory.

This course will ensure you have the strategic knowledge to support your creative thinking. And, with a range of options for placements and internships, you’ll be well on your way to an exciting career.

A perfect mix
You’ll explore every element of the advertising spectrum, from traditional print-based materials to digital media.

This course blends commercial, theoretical and creative units to give you the edge when you start work. Although it’s academically challenging, the practical nature of the course means you’ll be ready to create effective campaigns in various formats and media.

Learn about today’s advertising challenges and discover how to build brands. Specialise further with one of our option units to develop the skills you need for a career you’re passionate about.

Real-world skills
Your lecturers have experienced advertising experts, sharing real examples to bring the theory to life. With our enviable network, we bring in some of the industry’s leading figures as guest lecturers.

Test your new knowledge on units like the live client brief. Or, spend a year in industry to gain vital experience with real-life projects. Blend your creative skills with strategic awareness to create campaigns that get results.

The Combined Honours program offers you an opportunity to study two subjects at degree level.

English:
English explores the role of writing in defining and transforming human experience. Creative writing is a contemporary art practice which expresses that experience.

At the Manchester campus, the English department has access to a community of internationally renowned writers and critics through the Manchester Writing School, one of the most successful of its kind in the UK. It boasts over 95 published graduates and its Creative Director is Carol Ann Duffy DBE (Poet Laureate 2009-2019).

Against this backdrop you will examine major periods and forms of literature, learning to analyze literary and media texts by drawing on wider humanities disciplines. Creative writing students will develop the craft of writing, learning to read as a writer and collaborate with artists across the creative spectrum. Both approaches develop the necessary skills in critical thinking and communication that are of value to graduates entering a wide array of career paths or establishing practice.

French:
Proficiency in modern languages can give you the competitive edge in the global jobs market. In both the private and public sectors, there is demand for professionals with strong language skills who can work in culturally diverse environments. Studying French at Manchester Metropolitan University will give you the opportunity to learn from native speakers. Our languages department have created their own multicultural community, including British, exchange and international students, along with foreign language assistants, allowing you to be absorbed into the everyday use of your chosen language.

The University has been providing professional language courses for more than 30 years and our staff are nationally, and in many cases internationally, recognized experts in their field. Our strong local, national and global links will help to enhance your study and future employment opportunities.

Data can provide insights to shape decision-making, power scientific innovation, improve business operations or inform government policy. But it takes state-of-the-art statistical and computational methods to unlock that power. Our MSc Data Science course lets you master those methods.

On this data science masters, we’ll equip you with the knowledge and skills to acquire, curate, manage and analyse data for solving real-world problems. You will gain essential, transferable computational and statistical thinking skills to create and deploy data-driven products and knowledge. And you’ll look at ways to solve challenges in a range of potential, data-rich, application domains, such as health, climate, transportation and sales.

You will have the flexibility to set the direction for your postgraduate studies with a master's project of your own design. While you’ll have the one-to-one support of your supervisor, it’s a solo project – as much about developing computing skills as it is about building confidence and autonomy, vital skills for the workplace.

We’ll help you put the technical skills into a real-world, professional context – helping you communicate your findings in the workplace, and address any of the legal or ethical questions that come with data processing.

MA Design Innovation considers how design acts as a catalyst for innovation, leading to new products, services and user experiences. It focusses on design thinking approaches, to address contemporary societal and business challenges to develop a rich understanding of where design can add value. It will provide you with the skills to strategically apply design to solve complex problems in the global market.

The application of design thinking is explored with the latest research and practice in design innovation, design management and design strategy, that supports you to develop a holistic view of design and creatively apply the theory in your specialist area. Design research, empathy and user-centered development are at the core of the program that reveals unmet user needs and, in turn, generate insights that lead to desirable products and services in a commercial and societal context.

The course provides a balance of theory and practices through a series of lectures, seminars, workshops, cross-disciplinary collaborations, research visits and live projects to provide you with comprehensive knowledge of design innovation while giving practical skills to excel professionally.

The world around us is changing – and our environmental science degree will help you understand how. You’ll learn the skills and knowledge to measure, model and assess environmental change and its impact. Developed with employers, including environmental agencies and private businesses, this is a program with real-world relevance, built around developing the techniques and expertise you’ll find in the workplace.

The course combines aspects of physical and life sciences, helping you build an understanding of environmental issues today. You’ll also gain a wide range of practical and analytical skills, working in the lab and the field. By the time you graduate, you’ll be able to collect, process and analyse data from a range of sources across different scientific disciplines – giving you the understanding to make informed recommendations in a professional context.

Placement options
All of our geography and environment degrees have been designed to be flexible. You can opt for the four-year placement degree route and spend Year 3 on a professional placement with a degree-related organisation.

Alternatively, if you opt for the four-year study overseas route, you will spend your third year in Europe, North America or Australia.

With a toolkit that mixes the creative and the technical, an animator does all this and more. Whether working in the artistic or commercial worlds, animators produce the moving images for anything from film and broadcast media to digital platforms and video games. Our BA (Hons) Animation course brings together key aspects of contemporary professional animation practice to help you prepare for an exciting range of careers, from animation to concept art to games development.

As an animation student you will be part the School of Digital Arts, a vibrant community that offers the chance to explore every aspect of what it means to work in the digital arts. You will work across a range of creative practices – just as the professionals do – to collaborate on cross-disciplinary group projects, alongside photographers, sound engineers, filmmakers, games and media professionals. And, just as we mirror industry practices, we also work with industry-standard tools – learning within a brand new, purpose-built building that comes equipped with the latest emerging technologies for animation, filmmaking and more.

Manchester offers an ideal setting as an animation student. A global, creative city, it has a long-established history of animation and is home to Cosgrove Hall Films – creators of numerous children’s animations and whose company founders were both students of Manchester Metropolitan University. Today the city has a thriving industry, with a significant TV, film and digital production presence at MediaCityUK, which is home to the BBC, ITV and a host of independent media companies, all of which offer you some inspiring opportunities.

With a course that’s built on our local heritage and that makes the most of our industry links, you’ll have the chance to develop the skills, build the network and gain the experience that rewarding careers are made from.

Placement options

SODA Placement Year
As part of your studies with SODA, you may 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.

SODA Study Year Abroad
You can choose to spend an academic year studying with an approved partner university overseas, developing your core skills while demonstrating your initiative by engaging with a challenging curriculum at a foreign institution. This offers practice credits from the host university, after you’ve completed Level 5 of your SODA program.

If you take the four-year placement route, Year 3 will be spent on placement.

Games design offers a route into a form of entertainment that’s not only one of the world’s most popular but is also constantly evolving, innovating and redefining its own boundaries. In short, the games industry is an exciting place to be and our BSc (Hons) Games Design course can offer your route into it.

Throughout the course, you’ll find an activity-led approach focused on the practical processes of making games. So, with our support you’ll build up a strong portfolio of games and game-like artefacts. As you progress, you’ll have the chance to pursue the specialist areas of the discipline that interest you most, and with cutting-edge assessments like our ‘Game a Week’, you’ll also build up your abilities as a games designer. Then, in your final year, you’ll not only work solo on your own game, but also work on a large-scale game through a series of smaller projects within a simulated game studio.

The School of Digital Arts offers the perfect setting for that kind of collaboration. That’s because our innovative curriculum paves the way for the same cross-disciplinary teamwork you’ll find in the professional digital sector – by working with students in sound design, animation and media production as well as students from our Department of Computing and Mathematics. The result is an environment that fosters creativity and helps you build a varied, well-rounded skillset. And, because SODA is purpose built with industry-standard facilities, you’ll leave us equipped with industry-standard technical skills too.

As a Games Design student, you’ll find Manchester offers both the perfect backdrop for your studies and an ideal launching pad for your professional ambitions. It’s not only home to a rich heritage of games publishing, but today has the largest media and creative sector outside London. On our doorstep, you’ll find a globally recognised web and UX sector, as well as renowned CG, visual effects and VR/AR agencies and at MediaCityUK in Salford, the BBC’s digital and games teams. All in all, it provides a range of opportunities for a graduate ready to make a statement in the world of games development.

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.