Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Sociology

at Anglia Ruskin University - Cambridge Campus United Kingdom

Using real-world challenges as your starting point, our BSc (Hons) Accounting and Finance degree will equip you with all the skills you need to dive into the world of business. Whether it’s through our Bloomberg Financial Markets Lab, out on placement or through an internship, you’ll get the chance to put what you learn to the test.

Alongside these practical opportunities, you’ll also be learning all about the ever-changing world of business – from business law to marketing concepts and beyond.

Our ACCA and CIMA accredited course could see you go on to become a practising accountant or opt for a wider range of careers in business – it’s up to you where your journey takes you.

At ARU, we’re helping to develop the next generation of business practitioners and thinkers.

Our Bloomberg Financial Markets Lab in Chelmsford can give you the chance to enhance your professional development and employability, through virtual trading and live financial information on global stock exchanges. Cambridge students can visit the Lab in their free time too alongside any-time access to data through Canvas, our learning management system.

With us, you’ll develop a deeper understanding of the knowledge and tools you need to launch your career. Because there’s having access to facilities and software, and there’s having the support to experiment with them. We believe the sooner you start, the more you’ll get out of it; that’s why our students can access Bloomberg from Year 1.

We know that your future career is important and you want to build your CV. So we’ll encourage you to grab every opportunity for real-world experience. This could mean a placement year in industry, studying abroad for a semester, or a short study visit in Europe, Canada, the USA or Malaysia.

Our Accounting and Finance degree course will set you up with all the theoretical and practical knowledge you need to work in finance or as an accountant once you graduate from ARU.

Your goal is to work as a solicitor. You want to enhance your legal knowledge, explore areas of the law that fascinate you, and gain hands-on experience working on real cases.

Gain the necessary competencies to become a practising solicitor with our full-time Advanced Legal Practice LLM course.

Get hands-on experience working on real pro bono cases in our Law Clinic, and graduate ready to take that all-important first step in your career, wherever your ambitions lie.

With small class sizes, expert lecturers and relevant, practice-led content, our LLM Advanced Legal Practice will give you the knowledge and skills you need for a career in law.

As well as covering the basics, our course includes a number of optional modules. Choose to explore business innovation, financial management, leadership or intercultural management – and tailor your studies to suit your interests.

We understand that while you’re here to learn, you’re also laying the foundations for your future career. We want to help you enhance your employability, and we do that in three ways.

Firstly, by studying with us in Cambridge or Chelmsford you’ll be exploiting our links with local businesses. We host regular visits from employers, guest speakers and business events – helping you build a network for when you graduate.

Throughout your Business Management degree you’ll also benefit from lectures and seminars on CV preparation, job-hunting, obtaining work experience, using social media to enhance your professional profile, and more.

And finally, we work with employers to make sure you graduate with the knowledge, skills and abilities they look for. They help us review what we teach and how we teach it – so you can be sure you’re working on projects that reflect the needs and priorities of business.

At ARU most of our business degrees also include an optional placement year, giving you the chance to spend a year working in industry and to add valuable work experience to your CV.

Discover how international relations theory affects real-world events, and develop crucial skills like decision making and debating. With prestigious guest lecturers and visits to think tanks such as Chatham House, you’ll gain all the experience you need for a role in global politics.

• Join a course that scored 100% for overall satisfaction in the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey 2019
• Attend prestigious guest lecturers and visits to think tanks such as Chatham House
• Focus on your own areas of interest with optional modules including global risk society, war reporting, and terrorism
• Develop your decision making, planning and debating with interactive sessions, specific scenarios and briefs

This course will give you an understanding of how international relations theory is applied to real-world policy and strategy, and the practical problems involved in this.

You’ll examine the theory and definition of the ‘state’ and relations between different states, and the roles of other institutions and organisations, like multinational companies and transnational crime organisations. All your studies will contain a strong vocational element, with a focus on how theory affects, and is affected, by real events on the ground.

As well as this foundation in general international relations theory and practice, you’ll also have the chance to focus on your own areas of interest. Our optional modules will let you choose from subjects like the global risk society, policing and security, corruption and cross-border crime, war reporting, and terrorism.

To develop your decision-making, planning and debating skills, you’ll take part in interactive sessions, respond to specific scenarios and briefs, and undertake critical analysis. You’ll also receive advanced instruction in research methods, a vital skill both for your studies and your future career.

With a supporting team of lecturers who have academic and professional backgrounds in international relations, you can be sure you’re receiving the latest theory and careers advice.

Our BA (Hons) Fashion Design degree will help you forge an identity as a designer, specialising in menswear or womenswear.

You’ll be hands-on from day one, creating your own fashion designs and engaging with all aspects of the design process in our studios, including pattern cutting, draping, textiles and digital media.

You’ll also learn about contemporary fashion promotion, including marketing, styling, fashion photography and art direction – and create campaigns to attract consumers and influencers to your brand. Alongside this you'll learn about the ethics of the fashion industry, and consider issues of sustainability that will help you to develop as a responsible industry professional.

You’ll work closely with students from across our creative community, including fashion students in other years, photographers and filmmakers to create eye-catching campaigns and digital content. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll get time, guidance and support from our team, including technical staff and course leader Mark Hart, who's worked with brands such as Chloe, Alexander McQueen, Warner Bros Records, and London Records.

As a BA (Hons) Fashion Design student at ARU, you’ll have the chance to find placements and internships with high-profile fashion houses and contemporary designers, including Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Mary Katrantzou, Marcus Lupfer and Mother of Pearl. You can also take an optional placement year.

We also attend trade fairs, such as Pure in London – the UK’s leading fashion buying event – or the fabric and trend show Premiere Vision in Paris; and visit suppliers and other businesses connected to the fashion industry.

Many of our students go on to establish their own labels or work for fashion houses and other well-known brands:

• Micaela Sapinho is now Creative Director of her own label, and has twice shown her collections at Lisbon Fashion Week
• Thanh Cong Vu has gone on to establish his own brand since graduating. While studying Fashion Design at ARU, his designs were shown at Pure and featured in Urban Coco magazine
• Priscilla Acquah Arhin is a textile designer with Samsonite
• Agnieszka Zabek works as Apparel Designer with Reebok
• Tracie Sell is Head of Menswear at Bolongaro Trevor in London
• Olivia Welsh is Creative Director of her own label, Olivia Annabelle
• Stephanie Cornforth is Lingerie Designer for Something Wicked
• Yasmin Lucy Greener is Assistant Accessories Designer at John Lewis.

By the end of the course, you too will have a new collection ready to show to the fashion industry at Graduate Fashion Week, and to the public at our own Graduate Fashion Show and Degree Show.

Whether you want to join the traditional publishing industry, establish your own small press or set up a single-author imprint for your own novels, this Masters degree will help you meet your ambitions.

Taught in Cambridge, our MA is the only Creative Writing and Publishing course in the East of England and has been taken by many successful published writers.It offers you an opportunity to develop your fiction writing in a supportive environment, while gaining key insights into publishing practice and international and digital rights.

Our fully customisable postgraduate course reflects the reality that authors are no longer insulated from business concerns. Even the biggest publishers expect authors to build their own platforms and audiences, manage their own social media and interpret sales.

As a student on ARU’s MA Creative Writing and Publishing you’ll benefit from our wide-ranging industry connections, as well as talks, workshops and masterclasses featuring publishers and established fiction writers. You’ll also be able to attend our publishing short courses for free.

In our Creative Writing workshops, you’ll get feedback on your writing from other students as well as from our experienced teaching team, including specialist lecturers and our Royal Literary Fund Fellows. This will give you a unique perspective on how your work is read by different audiences.

Focusing a range of periods and themes including British and global histories, race and politics, gender, sexuality and the body, and also how we recreate history, you’ll take part in hands-on historical research to make sense of how past events have shaped our world today.

Cambridge is the perfect place to study history. Thanks to our close links with local organisations, you’ll find yourself handling historical objects, leafing through archival material, and working with museum professionals, as well as engaging with digital sources and archives.

There’s also the chance to study abroad for a semester, take part in European field trips, and go on work placements as you prepare for a career in many different fields including business, management, local government, heritage, museums and more.

As a history student at ARU, you'll form an understanding of why people and societies think and behave as they do – and how these actions can echo down the centuries. This historical insight will sharpen your ability to analyse and tackle complex problems, such as how social divisions arise and dictators come to power. You’ll also form an awareness of the limitations of our knowledge and the dangers of simplistic explanations.

These are important skills, with the World Economic Forum listing complex problem solving and critical thinking as two of the top 10 skills we need to thrive in today’s workforce.

In Years 2 and 3, our optional modules allow you to explore the areas of history that interest you most, with topics including the First World War, modern British politics, sport, the Russian Revolution and histories of everyday life. There is even a class on the history of James Bond! Meanwhile, your Undergraduate Major Project lets you complete a substantial piece of research work so that you become a historian in your own right.

You’ll be supported by staff, recognised as leaders in their field, whose expertise ranges from British imperialism and Victorian studies, to modern politics, gender history and the history of sense and emotions. It’s no surprise that our BA (Hons) History degree came 4th in the UK for ‘Satisfied with Teaching’ in The Guardian University Guide 2019 – and received an overall satisfaction score of more than 94% in the National Student Survey 2020.

Do you want a career that gets to the heart of society’s problems and changes people’s lives? Gain the skills to identify key social challenges, and analyse and identify policies used to address them on this interdisciplinary Masters course.

• Choose to take a work placement as part of your Major Project, with support from the course staff and the Employability team
• Study in Cambridge, a hub for exchanges on social welfare and policy reflected in the many networks and events, including the Festival of Ideas and Festival of Being Human
• Learn from a Course Leader who is a specialist in research and teaching in an international context
• Study on a course with a truly global outlook, from its multicultural students to its focus on international issues
• Attend guest lecturers by key figures in policy-making and field trips to national and international organisations like Chatham House, Oxfam and UNICEF

Why study social welfare and social policy?

• Studying social welfare and social policy will allow you to focus on the areas of most importance to people’s lives, including education, housing, health, and criminal justice, giving you the skills and understanding to make a difference to people’s lives at local, national and international levels.
• It will prepare you for many careers in non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including community organisations, charities, social enterprises and not-for-profit organisations, as well as governmental or academic institutions.

What will you do on the course?

• How can issues such as child labour and trafficking be overcome through global initiatives? Can changes to local policy do anything to stop domestic violence or knife crime?
• On our Masters course, you will explore these and many other issues, comparing different strategies and policies across different countries, and from the perspective of many different disciplines, including politics, criminology and psychology.

Why study social welfare and social policy at ARU?
Our Master’s course attracts multicultural students with a variety of backgrounds from sociology to business studies, and health to the Arts.

Whatever their background, our students are all enthusiastic about making a difference to their communities by improving human rights and living conditions. This might include changing how their society handles issues such as gender equality, prisoners’ rights, children’s education, or environmental protection, among others.

The international dimension of our Masters course will also make you an attractive candidate for potential employers – you will be used to working alongside people from different backgrounds, as well as exploring social issues from the perspective of different cultures.

Our BA (Hons) Illustration and Animation course explores the connections between animation and illustration, helping you to create sequential narratives using a variety of methods – from traditional handmade image-making, to the latest specialist 2D digital animation, 3D CGI used in industry and cutting-edge interactive techniques.

As well as gaining strong software skills and a good understanding of animation, timings and motion, you will become an innovative and creative thinker. You will develop creative abilities, technical skills and a personal language within animation, with the focus being on illustration and design.

Within our supportive and vibrant studio culture, you will work on a range of projects from narrative animation, animated idents, motion graphics, character design, storyboarding, CGI and concept art to develop a body of work for your professional portfolio and showreel, preparing you for industry.

Perhaps most importantly, you’ll get time, guidance and support from a team of industry professionals, animators and illustrators and visiting industry experts who are dedicated to your creative development. In your final year you will also receive guidance from an assigned industry advisor dedicated to the year.

While developing a unique visual style, you’ll also focus on the core foundations: studying the world around you, refining your drawing skills, learning the fundamentals of animation skills using industry standard 2D and 3D animation software, such as TV paint and Maya and learning to create engaging stories through moving images.

You’ll go on group reportage drawing trips, with opportunities to visit museums, galleries and animation festivals in the UK and overseas. You’ll find lots of visual inspiration in Cambridge – from the Botanic Gardens to the art collection in the Fitzwilliam Museum, to the city’s architectural beauty and vibrant cultural and student life.

As a BA (Hons) Film Production student at ARU, you will be supported by award-winning, lecturers whose work has been screened on all the major UK television networks, as well as at multiple international film festivals. They have won Emmys, HUGOs and BAFTAs and continue to practice.

With their encouragement, you'll produce a rage of programmes and films which may ultimately be as prize and film festival worthy as recent student work. Our second year documentary, Tertiary Sound was officially selected for the BFI London Film Festival and in competitions like the Royal Television Society (East) Student Awards, our students have a growing tradition of success. In 2019, ARU Film Production students scooped up Best Drama, Best Editing, Best Production Design, Best Camera, Best Sound and Best Writing at the RTS (East) student awards, cementing the course’s reputation as a national centre of excellence.

You’ll have access to a series of guest lectures and workshops led by industry professionals where you’ll learn more about industry practices, receive invaluable advice and have an opportunity to network with visiting film and programme makers.