Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in English Literature and Creative Writing

at University of Hertfordshire - De Havilland Campus United Kingdom

This course covers three specific themes: sports coaching, sports development and sports management, which build in breadth and depth as you progress. You’ll study a range of subjects that impact on sports participation and performance, including an introduction to sports science and sociology of sport. During your studies you’ll benefit from some of the best university sports facilities in the UK, and take part in coaching and other work experience opportunities. This work-related experience combined with academic and focus on communication skills will enhance your career prospects.

Like the BEng, this course specialises in aircraft design, especially aircraft structures, materials and aerodynamics. You’ll follow the same pathway as the BEng programmes, but in your extra year you’ll deepen your knowledge and understanding of aerospace topics. You’ll also sharpen your business and management skills. The team project is multidisciplinary and involves applying your skills to solve an unusual and challenging problem, for example the design of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for surveillance on Mars. You can also participate in competitions such as BMFA Heavy Lift competition, where you and your fellow students have the chance to design and build your own UAV and compete against teams from across Europe.

• This MEng degree in Aerospace Engineering has an excellent, long-established reputation with the aerospace industry
• The University of Hertfordshire has produced aerospace engineers with practical experience of design and development for future aerospace systems
• Our MEng Aerospace Engineering students have previously completed work placement years at companies including: Marshall Aerospace, Virgin Atlantic Engineering, and Rolls Royce plc
• You will have access to the best equipment: flight simulator, wind tunnels, specialist laboratories and CAE software
• You will be offered a flying experience at a local flying school with one-to-one instruction on fixed wing aircraft
• Our aerospace staff have a wealth of industrial experience which gives an applied approach to their teaching and their contacts prove invaluable to graduates seeking employment
• Recent Aerospace Engineering graduates have gone on to work at organisations including Ministry of Defence, Shell UK, and Telefonica

This course specialises in the design and production of immersive, innovative and surprising interior spaces. There’s great emphasis on the understanding and use of materials as you explore surface design and detailing. Throughout the course you’ll work with existing buildings and conditions, producing refit, refurbishment, retrofit, re-use and place-making designs. As you progress you’ll develop an expertise in producing impressive drawings, images and models, as you not only design functional, contemporary and innovative interiors, but – above all else – create immersive atmospheres.

• Interior Architecture and Design students have participated in live projects with a number of commercial partners including Letchworth Garden City urban regeneration, Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen, Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange, The Forum Hertfordshire, Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council and St Albans Museums.
• The degree focuses on working with existing buildings and spaces and exploring different possibilities for habitation.
• The Interior Architecture and Design degree pursues a progressive and holistic teaching approach as we consider the design process as something non-linear or sequential (i.e. research first, design later).
• Graduates from the course are eligible for associate membership to professional institutions such as: The British Interior Design Association, The Society of British Interior Design and The Chartered Society of Designer.

As with our aerospace technology with management degree, this broad-based aviation course has an emphasis on computer-aided engineering – including 3D modelling, computer-aided analysis, simulation and computer-aided manufacture. You’ll develop your practical skills in workshops and well-equipped laboratories, while your piloting skills are developed in the second half of the course through the University’s flight simulators and tuition at a nationally recognised flight centre in the UK or US. There are additional fees for this but at a discounted rate. You’ll also take part in group work, which will enable you to develop your team-working skills and improve your employability.

More about the Course

This programme develops a range of skills applicable in different branches of engineering, reinforcing them through practical experience as you work towards obtaining a UK National Private Pilot's Licence.  Flying lessons are offered by a nationally-recognised flight centre.  Whilst this is an additional expense for students on this course they will give University of Hertfordshire students an attractive discounted rate.

In the first year of your BSc Honours degree course in Aerospace Technology with Pilot Studies you will gain a broad grounding in engineering, focusing on technology, information technology and management, including a basic introduction to the aerospace industry.

In your second year you will build on your knowledge of core technologies, IT and management skills as they are applied within the aerospace industry. This includes studying aerodynamics with, wind tunnel testing, design of aircraft structures and components, using commercial standard software used within the aerospace industry. You will also study elements of the PPL ground school syllabus such as meteorology, human factors, air law and navigation topics.

In your final year you concentrate on the application of aerospace technology - including aircraft performance, propulsion, manufacturing, and avionic systems - and key business skills. A project to design a complete aircraft fosters teamwork capabilities where your skills as a pilot will be put to the test in validating the design through the use of a flight simulator. You will also develop specialist knowledge by undertaking a major project on a relevant topic, and have further opportunity for flying. A key element is undertaking all pilot training necessary to take the NPPL examinations at a local flying school.

• This is the ideal course if you are interested in a role that combines technical knowledge with piloting
• The student with greatest flying performance is awarded a Scholarship, to extend their pilot training after graduation
• You will have access to excellent equipment: flight simulator, wind tunnels, specialist laboratories and CAE software
• Provides potential pilots with a high-level qualification for alternative employment in the aerospace sector
• Our BSc Aerospace Technology with Pilot Studies students have previously completed work placement years at companies including: Inflite Services, Virgin Atlantic Engineering, and British Airways
• Recent Aerospace Technology graduates have gone on to work at organisations including Airbus Defence and Space, Fujitsu, and Toyota
• You can gain access to this course with a broad range of entry qualifications and an enthusiasm for flying

This course has been developed in accordance with industry guidelines to give you a professionally grounded, challenging and creative education, focusing on architecture, principles of urbanism, landscape and building construction. You’ll work within a professional, studio-based architectural environment on a variety of industry projects, including houses, shops, museums, public buildings, squares, cities and civic centres.You’ll also visit and analyse places and engage with the social, political and economic factors that influence architecture and society. By working individually and in multidisciplinary teams, you’ll gain an understanding of cultural and urban conditions, learn how to improve the built environment and develop a sharp commercial awareness of the architecture industry.

The BA (Hons) Architecture award will provide graduates with a professional network to facilitate early career development after graduation.

The School of Creative Arts prides itself on providing our students with a strong technical and professional design education, and we place significant value on the preparation of our students for the world of work.  

The Architecture programme has a range of world-class industry partners who engage with us in teaching and learning and in providing current and future thinking on contemporary practice.

We place our students in a unique position to understand, explore, and intervene in the changing landscape as it evolves from the ideal social settlement of the Garden Cities of the early twentieth century to the post-war New Towns and future cities.

You’ll be introduced to Linguistics, the scientific study of everything to do with language, from its structure and how it develops in children, to the ways it reflects society, how it’s used, and how it changes over time. You’ll be taught by research-active academics working in cutting-edge areas such as language and gender, formulaic language, corpus studies, bilingualism, bilingual processing and codeswitching.

What links our work is our focus on the applied use of English language, from English Language teaching to the use of forensic linguistics in solving language-related real-life problems such as plagiarism and crime investigation, to speech and language therapy and the study of language disorders.

In your first year, alongside core linguistics modules, you’ll study language and mind, where you’ll analyse child speech transcripts and consider language acquisition. You’ll also explore the diversity of use of the English language including regional variants, pidgin and creole English, language and ethnicity, and slang and street English.

Core modules in your second year focus on English grammar and the sounds of English. You can explore theories of how and why language developed and take a language competencies module leading to a work placement.

In your final year you can develop your own interests in short projects, or follow modules in different topics, including child language and communication, clinical linguistics, gender and language, and formulaic language, informed by our academics’ own research specialisms.

One final year option is corpus studies in English language, which will develop your research skills through your use of Sketch Engine, a text analysis tool that allows you to search vast samples of language, or corpora. Want to know when the word ‘Brexit’ first appeared in print or when ‘backstop’ acquired a new meaning? Find out by delving into databases of billions of words, to pursue your own original research projects.

Our Creative Writing course explores and develops your creative writing practice. We offer a stimulating and supportive place in which to explore your ideas, hone your craft and understand a wide variety of texts. Our creative writing modules are taught by lecturers who are themselves award-winning practitioners and who bridge the gap between creative and academic approaches to writing. They include:

• Poetry lecturer Dr Wayne Holloway-Smith, winner of the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and Seamus Heaney Prize nominee.
• Fiction and Non Fiction writer, Dr Lorna Gibb, author of five books, winner of the Granta Memoir prize and shortlisted for the Sperber Biography prize in the US.
• Dramatists Simon Vinnicombe and Drew Pautz, with writing credits that include the whole gamut of scriptwriting, from work in current production as feature films to Eastenders to the Old Vic and Royal Court. They have international reputations with performances, in original and translated versions, in Canada, Europe and the United States.
• Fiction and non-fiction writer, Helen Gordon, a former editor of Granta, with two acclaimed books and numerous short publications.

Over the three years you can choose specialist creative writing modules in poetry, creative non-fiction, drama, short story writing and prose fiction. As well as fostering your own creative writing skill, you will study a huge range of different texts, both literary and commercial, to gain understanding of what makes a piece successful as well as have an overview of the industry marketplace.

Recent successes for our students include short stories published in Bandit and AnotherLenz magazines and poetry published in Rising and international magazine Poetry London.

In your first year, an underpinning core module, Becoming a Writer, will introduce you to genres and forms and examine the universalities of dialogue, plot and language. A second core module, Identity and Contemporary Writing, presents some of the most exciting new writing as a model for your own work, while optional modules enable you to specialise in writing for the screen, develop your critical skills with texts in different genres, or explore twentieth century culture and society.

Other core modules will develop your writing practice in creative non-fiction, short stories, poetry and writing for the stage, while a range of options will allow you to choose between literary analysis, 20th century English literature or writing a historical documentary.

For your final year, your particular creative interest can be channelled into a long piece of writing, which can be poetry, prose or drama. This work will be discussed and reviewed in tailored workshops that will allow you to both explore and develop your own voice. The third year also offers a wide range of core and option modules that look at different fiction genres, including fantasy, crime, horror and romance, as well as writing serial drama, late Victorian literature, and exploring the lives of women from a historical perspective.

Top reasons to study Creative Writing at the University of Hertfordshire:

• The opportunity to develop and explore your writing skill in an encouraging and supportive environment.
• A brilliant team of lecturers who are all recently published writers in their own field and can use their industry experience, as well as their academic skill and knowledge, to nurture your talent.
• A flexible course of study with a wide range of options to choose from, allowing you to focus on the topics that interest you most.
• Careers development helping you to understand the practicalities of how to get published.
• The chance to study at a University with a Gold Rating for Teaching.
• A dedicated (and free!) writing academy before the academic year starts to help with the return to learning, if you have been away from education.

The BA (Hons) Education Degree provides important multidisciplinary tools for studying education. It selectively draws from fields such as history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics, and economics aiming to promote critical understandings of such things as teaching, learning, curriculum and assessment. Importantly, it considers the moral, social and political issues which intertwine with these, such as inclusion, access and equity.

Education is important to the world. Studying it to the best of your ability is to exercise an equally important responsibility.

Joining a university is joining a culture. We co-create this culture through the way we behave:

• As open-minded scholars
• As caring individuals respectful of each other’s stories and ideas, and by
• Making the best use of the rich resources the University has to offer such as studying the core texts and beyond. 

In this spirit, and throughout the program, you will:

• Routinely be encouraged to share your works-in-progress in both face-to-face and online environments
• Be given tools with the expectation that you’ll use to think reflexively about education and your own learning journey; and
• Be given many opportunities to experience and explore real work environments inside and outside the University that will help to prepare you for the next phase in your journey.

Our BA History and English Literature gives you the opportunity to study two subjects that speak closely to each other.

Just as poems, plays and novels can offer historians different ways to look at the past, historical documents can also be read as texts to be interpreted as works of narrative.

For both English Literature and History we have modernized and diversified our curriculum to reflect our changing world. Within our research-led courses you’ll study canonical texts and periods of history familiar to a traditional English or History degree but also voices and histories that reflect our modern, globalized 21 st century experiences.

You’ll start this joint degree with a core module that will teach you the skills of close analysis of literary texts. Reflecting on poetry by Danez Smith and Sylvia Plath, Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud 9 as well as work by Shakespeare and Zadie Smith, you’ll discover new ways of thinking about what literature is, and how to read it.

Also in your first year you’ll work through the Historian’s Toolkit, which helps you make the transition from school to university-level study. You will be introduced to an array of primary sources. You’ll also gain insights into historiography, to understand what influences historians, why they write the way they do and how they interact with one another.

Throughout your course, the common link between the two disciplines will be your analysis and interpretation of texts. The skills you’ve learned in your close reading of fiction are in many respects the same as those you will apply to your analysis of historical documents.

One of your second-year core English Literature modules is period-based, focusing on the 18th century, and offers a good example of how English and History are complementary. Your study of 18th century print culture and the emergence of the novel will be enhanced by your understanding of the politics of the day.

In your final year your courses will cover themes aligned to our academics’ research interests. You’ll have the chance to follow your interests and shape your studies, which could include African American literature, young adult fiction, or literary adaptations. Your History modules may focus on a particular region, such as Europe, or period, such as the 20th century.

We give you: 

• A flexible programme of study, allowing you to concentrate on areas you find especially interesting
• Exceptional academic teams, conducting world-leading research
• Stimulating, innovative courses that allow you to make rewarding connections between two disciplines
• CV-building potential through work placements and extra-curricular activities
• Teaching rated excellent by 92.14% of our English students in the 2018 National Student Survey, with our History students reporting almost 94% overall satisfaction with their course

One of a range of degrees from the taught Master's Programme at the Department of Computer Science

This course examines current research and practice in software engineering. You will develop knowledge and skills in the models, methodologies, measures and tools that can be employed in software development considered as an engineering discipline.

Why choose this course?

• This MSc is available with an optional one-year industry placement. The 'with placement' programmes give you additional industrial experience by applying the skills you have learned throughout your studies.
• One of a range of advanced courses within our postgraduate Master's programme in Computer Science, this particular course provides you with a specialism combining theoretical knowledge and practical skills in advanced computer science.
• This MSc develops graduates’ practical skills of producing models of software engineering processes and artefacts using appropriate modelling techniques, and applying measures to software engineering processes and artefacts and use the data produced to evaluate software engineering activities.
• Taught by a highly-regarded and long-established computer science department with strong links to business.