Bachelor of Arts in International Relations

at Durham University United Kingdom

Our one year, full-time MSc in Management programmes are designed to provide you with the tools, techniques and knowledge to succeed in business.

Effective management of human resources is vital to business success. The MSc Management (HRM) will develop your knowledge of human resource management and can help you prepare for a career in human resources.

Our MSc Management (HRM) is accredited by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD). The CIPD is the largest professional body of HR and Learning and Development professionals with some 140,000 members across the globe. As a student on the MSc Management programme you have the option to join the CIPD (additional fee applies). Upon successful completion of your MSc (in line with the requirements of the CIPD) you will be eligible for the award of the CIPD’s Advanced Diploma in Human Resource Management; your CIPD membership will be automatically updated to Associate Member, confirming your credentials as prospective HR professional.

The programme consists of a set of core and elective modules, culminating in a practice-based business project or a research-based dissertation.

This course provides an opportunity to develop an advanced knowledge of corporate law. There is a (compulsory) foundation course providing a solid grounding in the subject. Having completed your choice of taught modules, you will then undertake an extended dissertation on a corporate law topic of your choice, supervised by a member of staff with expertise in their chosen subject area.

Teaching is by a mixture of lectures and smaller, student-led, seminar or tutorial groups. The dissertation is pursued by independent research with individual supervision. Students attending the course are drawn from a broad range of countries, and their previous academic or professional experiences enrich the course.

The School is host to the Durham Institute of Commercial and Corporate Law, and you are encouraged to participate in its many activities. The Library has extensive holdings of corporate law materials.

The BEng Electrical Engineering degree is a high-quality three-year degree designed to offer you the knowledge and skills necessary to join engineering teams on graduation. It is complementary to the four-year Durham MEng, and transfer is possible between the courses up to the end of the second year. It is important to highlight that you also can transfer between the different Engineering programmes that we offer (Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Electronic, etc.) up until the end of the second year, provided that you meet the relevant progression requirements. We believe that students should make an informed decision about their futures and allowing our students to transfer between programmes, once they understand the different disciplines, demonstrates our commitment to this and the Department’s General Engineering philosophy.

In the first two years, the BEng covers the same broad base of engineering education as the MEng degree. The BEng prepares you for an exciting career in modern engineering, with the flexibility to respond to changing technologies.

Geophysics is the application of physical principles to the study of the structure and dynamics of the Earth and increasingly other planets. Geophysics has many practical applications and forms an essential part of the economic exploitation of hydrocarbon and mineral resources. Geophysicists are also involved with assessing and mitigating natural hazards such as earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis.

The Geophysics with Geology degree shows progression from the first year through to the third year. In the first year, you share the core modules with the other degree courses, but it also includes additional core modules which specialise in Mathematics and Physics. In the second and third years, you deal with material that is specialist, numerically based and at the cutting-edge of geophysical research.

Graduates from this degree have secured employment across the geoscience sector, within the mineral exploration and extraction industries, in petroleum exploration companies, and with environmental and hydro-geological industries. The advanced quantitative skills developed during this course can provide a strong base for securing employment outside geoscience, for example, in finance, insurance and banking.

Graduates of the course typically go on to work in museums or large heritage organisations. Graduate students are drawn from a wide range of disciplines, but manual dexterity, a knowledge of chemistry and an enthusiasm and desire to work with museum objects are essential.

The course is delivered through a mixture of lectures, seminars and practical classes as well as a dissertation. Typically lectures provide key information on a particular area, and identify the main areas for discussion and debate among Conservators in that area. Practicals then provide opportunities for you to implement and develop your skills, based on the knowledge that you have gained through your lectures and through independent study outside the programmes formal contact hours. Self-development learning packages allow you to continue your learning in a structured way outside of the practical sessions. The dissertation allows you to develop advanced research skills in an aspect of conservation or artefact studies.

The balance of activities changes throughout the course, as you develop your knowledge, skills and ability as independent learners and practitioners. The course therefore prepares you for work or further study once you have graduated, with an emphasis on taking your learning from the classroom to real life situations in Museums and conservation laboratories. All teaching is delivered by qualified conservators.

Criminology is concerned with understanding crime, deviance and institutions of criminal justice.

Criminologists seek to answer questions like: why are some people more likely to commit or be victims of crime than others; how can crime be effectively prevented or controlled; and from a more critical perspective, how do particular activities become defined as “criminal” in the first place and what does this tells us about the nature of power and authority in society?

Overall, the course progressively develops your critical understanding of Criminology through the examination of key concepts and theories as well as substantive issues related to crime and criminal justice. Alongside this, the course teaches critical analytical and methodological skills to equip students with the practical expertise required to engage with and carry out Criminological research. As such, by the end of the course, graduates will be able to draw upon conceptual and empirical material to critically analyse complex Criminological issues in a scholarly fashion.

The degree is based on a modular structure, with students required to take the equivalent of six modules (some of which may be ‘double modules’) within each year of study. Over the course of the degree, modules become increasingly focused on specialist topics and issues, with the chance to undertake a Sociological research project on a specific topic of substantive interest in the final year of study.

Our MSc programmes in Economics will give you the opportunity to equip yourself with the necessary skills and knowledge to pursue a career in economics and related disciplines.

The programme consists of a set of core and elective modules, culminating in a practice-based business project or a research-based dissertation.

Core and elective modules:
Core modules provide a foundation of essential knowledge and understanding.

• Advanced Macroeconomics
• Advanced Microeconomics
• Public Choice
• Public Economics

The MSc Global Politics aims to provide you with knowledge of the political, economic, cultural and moral debates about how and to what extent the effects of globalisation can be governed.

This course will provide the means for you to develop the analytical and conceptual skills necessary to understand and discuss:

• The key international and transnational structures, organisations and institutions that have developed in the era following the Second World War
• The range of the academic debates in the area of global governance
• Policy developments and innovations in the fields of economics, security, and environment
• The moral justification for different and sometimes competing regimes of global governance.

You will also benefit from the wide range of academic resources within the School of Government and International Affairs, the Law School, the Department of Geography, and Durham University Business School, making the MSc Global Politics a truly unique interdisciplinary course.

The first year of the History degree offers you the opportunity to study a range of periods and approaches to history. Many of the modules cover quite large topics or long periods; these are intended to introduce you to subjects which may be unfamiliar and which pose new questions and new problems, showing you how wide the study of history really is.

You will take ‘Making History’ which will enable you to develop more advanced study skills through working in a small, intensive seminar. These require extensive reading, discussion, and writing about problems of historical interpretation in a defined area, and will focus on both primary and secondary sources. The module is divided into different strands from which you will make your choice.

In addition, you will choose four further modules from a list of approximately 12. You must choose at least one Medieval, one Early Modern, and one Late Modern module. Typically, you will have one weekly lecture and a small-group seminar every two or three weeks. For the seminar, you will be given reading to do in advance, and on the basis of this you and the other students in your group will discuss particular issues. Students are expected to lead the discussion in seminars. Most modules are assessed by coursework essays and by a two-hour examination in May/June, in which you write answers to two essay-style questions.

The modules on offer change each year, as they reflect the research interests of staff; we cannot guarantee in advance that a particular module will be running in any particular year.

Advances in fields such as Physics, Engineering, Earth Sciences or Finance are increasingly driven by experts in computational techniques. Notably, people skilled to write code for the most powerful computers in the world and skilled to process the biggest data sets in the world can truly make a difference.

The MSc in Scientific Computing and Data Analysis offers an application-focused course to deliver these skills with three interwoven strands:

• Computer Science underpinnings of scientific computing (algorithms, data structures, implementation techniques, and computer tool usage)
• Mathematical aspects of data analysis
• Implementation and application of fundamental techniques in a domain specialisation (presently astrophysics, particle physics, or financial mathematics).

Through MISCADA’s Earth & Environment domain specialisation, we seek to provide the advanced knowledge of how to use sophisticated datasets and tools to tackle cutting-edge and societally-relevant problems relating to the Earth’s environment and management of its scarce resources. We introduce a variety of Earth and Environmental datasets, as well as to the specialist mathematical and software tools required for their quantitative and computational analysis.