Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Games Design with Placement Year

at Manchester Metropolitan University United Kingdom

Businesses and governments rely on economists to help them examine issues, identify trends and deal with financial uncertainty. By studying our BA/BSc (Hons) Economics degree, you’ll explore how organizations and individuals invest and allocate their resources.

Throughout the course, we’ll challenge you to think about choices people make and how those decisions affect every aspect of our lives. You’ll explore everything from employment to distribution of wealth, government spending to international trade.

Please note that all students will apply directly to the BA (Hons) Economics. After studying BA (Hons) Economics in the first year, you can choose to continue on the BA (Hons) Economics, or transfer to BSc (Hons) Economics through the second and third year of study.

Sport is part of Manchester’s DNA. It’s a big feature of the city’s history, character and economy – it’s also a big part of Manchester Met.

As one of few management courses in the UK focusing solely on sports, we cover topics including sport policy, marketing and business analytics.

Unlike other courses in the country, you’ll also explore areas such as politics, finance and law to understand how they apply to the sports industry.

The world of business is always evolving – adapting to new technology, moving with geopolitical events and reacting to the shifting financial climate. But there is one constant: people. Growth, change, success – it’s only possible with a well-managed workforce, no matter what the industry or sector.

By focusing on the human element of effective business leadership, this is a course that offers vital transferrable skills, providing the first steps of a range of career paths. You’ll leave us equipped to pursue roles across a vast range of sectors in a wide variety of disciplines.

We’ve built an impressive network with industry experts and major employers – sharing understanding and opportunity. For us, it means keeping our expertise at the cutting edge of business and human resource management. For you, it means learning from leading professionals from organizations like PwC and AJ Bell. Plus, if you opt for a third-year placement, it’s a network that can open doors to the sort of employers where you can turn classroom theory into workplace practice.

Placement options
Our BA (Hons) Business and Human Resource Management degree offers the chance to spend a year getting a taste of professional life. It not only gives you the opportunity to develop your core skills and learn about how business really operates in your industry, but also shows employers that you’re ready to get to work.

The business school placement team is ready to help. They offer a wide range of services, including employer presentations, advice and placement fairs. But it’s also up to you – the more proactive you are about applying for placement opportunities, the better.

An international relations degree will help you to gain appreciation of how states, international organizations, and non-state actors interact on the global stage. This course is about using theories and models to best explain and understand power in the world, why the world is the way it is, and how we can change it. This takes place at all levels, from individuals to whole global systems, and understanding this allows us to question what we think we know, what we think matters, and how we can develop a better world. Supported by knowledgeable and passionate staff, you’ll start by looking at the core critical and emancipatory theories of International Relations and their underlying methods.

You’ll get a broad grounding in the key issues of today’s world and the contested historical development of world politics; studying topics informed by staff research such as terrorism, security studies, human rights, cultural politics, and many others.

A wide variety of options means that you can pursue your own interests – with things becoming increasingly flexible as you progress through the course, and in your final year, you will engage more directly with current academic debates and contemporary political developments.

We place a heavy emphasis on employability and offer valuable practical skills training, including advanced analytical approaches, which many employers look for when offering placement opportunities. This, alongside the possible opportunity to study abroad – with all the experience that it brings – means that an International Relations degree opens doors to a range of interesting and rewarding career possibilities.

You can also combine international relations with another subject and broaden your outlook still further, and 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 MA Inclusive Education master's is a flexible course for anyone interested in critically exploring inclusive education. We offer a full-time route and a part-time route so you can study at a pace that suits you.

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’ll be joining a diverse and thriving community of postgraduate students from the UK and across the world.

You’ll analyse key issues, significant debates and global concepts in the field of inclusive education. Reflect on your personal understandings of special educational needs and consider the relationship between educational values and the development of inclusive practice.

You’ll learn the theoretical knowledge from expert educational researchers to make an impact in your current professional setting or future career and become a leader in education. You will evaluate and learn to think with a range of theoretical frameworks to deepen your critical analysis. And you’ll explore how theory informs how we interpret and analyse key issues in education.

We aim to empower you to approach your own research with confidence. You’ll extend your understanding of research techniques 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).

You’ll learn from experts in education to become a leader in the areas of education that interest you. You’ll be able to specialise your studies around the educational topics you’re passionate about by choosing an option unit based on work by world-class researchers in the Faculty of Health and Education. Specialist 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 masters degree that highlights areas of your personal and professional interest.

Film and media studies focuses on the in-depth exploration of both cinematic and media forms, from the established to the new and emergent, from TV to games.

Taught by a large team with a diverse range of interests, you’ll have access to cutting-edge research expertise and excellent resources in a department as dedicated to supporting students as it is to inspiring them.

Film units introduce you to the history of cinema and its many forms and genres. This course will broaden your horizons from Anglo-American film to world cinemas, and develop your skills as a critical interpreter of the cinematic text. Media units explore the development of media industries, forms and criticism, but focus particularly on current and emerging platforms and industries. In your final year you can explore your interests in depth by completing an independent project on a topic of your own choice, working with academics who are experts in their fields.

The creative industries sector in Manchester offers a broad range of opportunities in professions linked to film and media. The city is an excellent place to study this subject and to begin gaining experience and building your networks. We’ll help you to be ready for the world beyond university by giving you the opportunity to engage with external partners, and you may have the chance to study abroad as part of your course, or to spend a year on a placement in industry in Britain or abroad.

At the heart of the Manchester Writing School are our master's programs in Creative Writing, available to study on campus in Manchester and also from anywhere in the world via online distance learning.

On our Master of Arts (MA) Creative Writing program, you will explore and practice techniques and styles of modern and contemporary writing and apply these through the development of your own creative work. You will undertake a taught element blending writing workshops with reading units and an elective, and then complete your studies through submission of an extended piece of writing from a proposed full-length book or script.

You will specialise in one of the following routes: Novel (including Short Fiction), Poetry, Writing for Children & Young Adults, Scriptwriting (for stage, screen or radio) or Creative Non-Fiction.

BSc (Hons) Criminology with Quantitative Methods offers exciting opportunities for you to study the cutting-edge discipline of criminology in the vibrant city of Manchester whilst gaining extensive quantitative skills. It is aimed at students who want to investigate crime and its causes, patterns, consequences and responses in a social context, as well as develop a specialism in quantitative research methods.

The first year introduces you to the building blocks of criminology: key concepts and theories, key institutions of the criminal justice system, crime policy, law and practice. You will receive training in a wide range of research methods, both qualitative and quantitative, during the first two years. In the final year you will focus on quantitative methods for designing, implementing and analysing social and criminological research, and complete an independent project.

The School of Digital Art's (SODA) Games Art course aims to empower you with the knowledge and skills to create immersive art for games and the interactive experiences of the future. It will explore games art in a range of professional contexts, through interdisciplinary investigations in imaginative concept art, dynamic character design, and immersive world-building. It will synthesise industry-standard tools, techniques and processes with emerging technologies, disruptive research and design thinking.

As a Games Art student you will be part of the School of Digital Arts and will be based within a brand new purpose-built building, equipped with the latest emerging technologies to enable you to develop industry-standard skills for creating and researching content across the latest digital platforms.

SODA is well positioned within Manchester for building a network and developing your research and practice in the media, games and digital tech industries. It is also home to staff from a wide range of disciplines who are research active and experts in their chosen areas. They enjoy well-established links to the wider creative media, arts and digital tech industries in Manchester, nationally and internationally.

The exciting interdisciplinary nature of the course may involve collaborative opportunities with students on other SODA courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, from faculties across the university, such as Arts and Humanities and the Department of Computing and Maths in the Faculty of Science and Engineering.

Supported by guest lectures from international artists, industry practitioners and academics, you will position your work within wider professional and global contexts to develop an innovative, creative practice and research projects.

With the rapidly changing nature of social and digital media, content needs to be designed strategically, engagingly and at pace.

Our BA (Hons) Future Media Production offers the skills and understanding to work at the forefront of the creative and digital sectors. It’s a course that will equip you with the tools to design, create, manipulate and deliver engaging digital media content for a wide range of audiences.

The course brings together key aspects of contemporary professional media practice, learning beyond the narrow confines of any single discipline. As such, you’ll learn alongside and collaborate with artists and designers across a range of exciting projects – laying the foundations for industry networking, technical and creative skills that will prove vital for a professional future in the creative media industries.

As a student at the School of Digital Arts you will work in an environment that is purpose-built for today’s fast-moving creative and digital sectors – offering boundary-breaking, cross-disciplinary learning that reflects modern project-based working practices. It’s a place that offers the opportunity to discover your passions and explore your role through collaboration within our dynamic creative community of animators, sound designers, filmmakers, games developers and more. And, just as it’s home to a cutting-edge creative community, it has the facilities to match. This means that you can develop industry-standard skills for creating content across the latest digital platforms.  

Just as SODA offers the perfect place as a creative student, Manchester provides the ideal setting. It’s a globally renowned and intensely creative city, second only to London as a hub for the UK’s media and creative sectors. The nearby MediaCityUK is home to major media and television businesses including the BBC and ITV, along with a host of independent operators, while the city also hosts a substantial animation, film and digital/tech sector. For students, it makes this a city for learning industry-relevant knowledge and workplace-ready skills. For budding creative media professionals, it makes the city a starting point for building a network, gaining experience and embarking on a career in the media, games and digital tech industries.