Master of Science in Computer Games Development with Placement Year

at Manchester Metropolitan University United Kingdom

Political and economic developments such as Brexit mean that international trade agreements, foreign direct investment and the attractiveness of where a company does business and accesses talent are more important than ever.

In the digital age, almost every business operates on the world stage and supplies to multiple countries. To help you compete in a hugely competitive global landscape, our International Business Management degree will give you a greater understanding of the nuances, challenges and opportunities of operating overseas.

Exploring enterprise, entrepreneurship and emerging markets

We’ll help you gain specialist knowledge in managing people of different cultures and backgrounds, and the political and governing structures of different markets that influence how businesses operate.

You’ll also develop the cross-cultural management skills you need to build international business relationships in often volatile political, cultural and economic environments.

Our International Business Management degree offers four-year routes where you can spend your third year on placement or study abroad at one of our overseas partner universities. Past students have worked for Johnson and Johnson in Tokyo, Hellman Worldwide Logistics in the USA and Warner Bros in London.

By the time you leave our business school, you’ll have the business knowledge and cross-cultural management skills to kick-start your career in the UK and abroad.

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.

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.

Based at the Manchester Metropolitan University Q-Step Centre in the Department of Sociology, this MSc approaches the study of quantitative methods in an innovative way. Right now, there is a demand for graduates with quantitative skills, and it is a demand our students are equipped to meet. Students studying on this MSc will be ready to pursue a career involving quantitative research skills within a diverse range of organisations. Students will also be prepared for doctoral study, which requires advanced skills on quantitative methods recognised by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and other research councils.

The course focuses on the development and application of key quantitative methods and analytical techniques. It focuses on the use of quantitative methods within real-world contexts and a key aim is to develop graduates' career-ready skills in this field.

Manchester Met’s Q-Step Centre is recognised as a centre for excellence in the teaching and training of quantitative methods, with a national and global reputation for its pedagogy. It has innovative research partnerships with a range of local organisations, and the community research projects run by the centre look to build on current knowledge to develop new strategies, aimed at empowering and transforming communities.  You will be taught by research-active academics from Q-Step and other multidisciplinary research centres including Policy Evaluation and Research Unit (PERU), Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, Big Data Centre in Sociology Department and this real-world research feeds directly into what they will be taught. The international research experience of the centre is embedded into the course content and delivery of the course is enhanced by incorporating cross-comparative survey data in lab activities and assessments. You will also have the opportunity to do your dissertation in collaboration with projects being carried out with these centres' international research partners. You will also be exposed to a variety of different perspectives and views within the discipline through lectures, seminars, talks and workshops delivered or co-delivered by international experts.

Placement options

• Placement-based dissertation, in which you will produce a piece of research on behalf of one of our partner organisations. We will help your source your placement.
• We work with over 25 partners across Greater Manchester to provide students with placements across diverse sectors.

There are few aspects of business more fundamental than people: they’re a vital ingredient of any organisation. It’s down to the HR professionals to deal with a vast range of business-critical issues, shaping workplace policies like redundancy, maternity leave and rewards, and supporting strategic decisions on areas like recruitment.

The best HR professionals have an in-depth understanding of how organisations operate and what the business objectives are – helping them advise employees and partner with the business.

We’ll help you explore the latest thinking in the subject, starting with first principles of managing people, analysing information and understanding behaviour. From there, you’ll expand into topics like managing across cultures and leading change. And, in your final year, you’ll also be able to pick your own subject as a research topic.

By the time you graduate, you won’t just have extensive knowledge of the role, you’ll also have a deeper understanding of the business and legislative landscape. In other words, you’ll leave ready to start your career in the world of HR.

Placement options

Our BA (Hons) Human Resource Management degree offers the chance to spend a year getting a taste of professional life. It’s an opportunity to develop core skills, explore your career goals and discover about how your industry really functions – and shows employers that you’re ready to get to work.

Our Business School Placement Team is ready to help. They offer a wide range of services, including employer presentations, advice and placement fairs. They’re well connected, with an extensive network of relationships with placement employers locally, nationally and internationally. But it’s also up to you – the more proactive you are about applying for placement opportunities, the better.

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.

Our integrated masters will set you on the path to an exciting career in the rapidly evolving world of electrical and electronic engineering.

Study at Manchester Met and you’ll start off by getting a solid introduction to key engineering principles, before specialising with subjects like electrical energy systems, control and automation and electronic systems design. You’ll also learn to use advanced engineering software as you develop your analytical skills and work on more cutting-edge topics.

Much of your learning will take place through projects, reflecting the multidisciplinary world of work. In these projects, set by academic colleagues and industry contacts, you’ll learn what it takes to come up with creative solutions to current engineering problems. You’ll get feedback and advice directly from industry insiders, giving you the chance to find out exactly what it takes to impress a potential future employer.

This degree is accredited by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) on behalf of the Engineering Council for the purposes of fully meeting the academic requirement for registration as a Chartered Engineer.

Placement options

All of our degrees offer 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.

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 you want to attract visitors to Blackpool or manage hotel staff in Barbados, tourism is full of exciting opportunities. And in the aftermath of the global pandemic, the sector is becoming more innovative than ever.

With input from leading organisations like ABTA, Qantas, Visit Manchester and TUI, we’ve developed a range of modules directly relevant to a career in the tourism industry. You’ll explore key questions like what makes an attractive destination? How can marketing be applied in different markets? Which management strategies get the best out of employees? And you’ll put your ideas into practice, working on real world briefs for real organisations.

Develop skills for life
Tourism is big business. To succeed in this competitive market, organisations need managers with strong business acumen and the creative flair to come up with innovative ideas. Here at Manchester Met, we’ll help you develop both.

You’ll build essential skills like analysing financial statements and planning budgets. You’ll study operational models, learn the theories behind human resource management, and can even add a new language to your repertoire. Then, to turn you from a competent manager to a brilliant one, we’ll help you think creatively, strategically and globally. You’ll discover how to apply your broad set of skills to any challenge your future business or employer might face.

Uncover inside knowledge
The course content covers a huge range of topics – but it’s the teaching team that will bring it to life. They’ll use their contacts, their latest research and their experiences working in the industry to inform their teaching. You’ll always be up to date with the latest insights, whether it’s new theories of tourist behaviours, or how businesses stayed agile throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

With our links to top employers and leading organisations, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to expand your network through work experience or special events like guest lectures. And with the option of studying abroad or spending a year on placement, you can expand your horizons even further.

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.

The BA (Hons) Acting programme is a leading actor training based in the heart of Manchester.

Led by a team of specialist and highly experienced directors, teachers and practitioners, the BA (Hons) Acting course at Manchester School of Theatre has an outstanding reputation for training actors with the skills necessary for a successful career in film, television, radio and stage.

We are looking for your imagination, empathy, curiosity, passion and wonder.

We are looking for expressive people who are energetic, dynamic and driven to tell stories.

We will nurture your ability, teach you your craft and encourage you on the path to creative excellence.

We encourage anyone with a passion for and commitment to acting to apply and we are dedicated to making our training as widely accessible as possible

You will work with a wide range of practitioners and a wealth of inspiring teachers and professional practitioners. You will train in all aspects of the craft including acting for stage, screen and radio.