Master of Science in Advanced Materials with Optional Industry Placement

at Manchester Metropolitan University United Kingdom

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.

The MChem (Hons) Chemistry is an integrated four-year undergraduate masters degree that covers study areas like reactions and mechanisms, materials chemistry, drug discovery, computational chemistry and spectroscopy, chemical synthesis and physiochemical processes.

The program is a high-standard platform for a range of careers. It includes a research project unit, where you spend a year focusing on a major independent project that you design, carry out and present, alongside your other areas of study.

Throughout our chemistry degree, you’ll develop the kind of practical skills vital for lab work, along with a balanced understanding of inorganic, organic, physical and analytical chemistry.  You’ll also have the flexibility to pursue the specialisms you’re most passionate about – through your final project, but also within the units you study, helping you shape the knowledge, experience and skills required for the career you aspire to.

This course will challenge your perceptions, ideas and understanding of sport coaching and development. You’ll journey into the world of sport, exploring the key theories around the subject and developing the practical skills to put them into action.

Our sport coaching and development program has been designed to build your knowledge in a broad range of areas, from coaching practice and techniques, to sport history, sociology and sport development.

Study at Manchester Met and you’ll be supported throughout your degree by an experienced team of academics, with access to subject experts and practitioners who work within the coaching and sport development sectors. You’ll learn in world-class facilities, including Platt Lane Sports Complex and our new £26m Institute of Sport building.

With our extensive network of national and regional sports organisations, you will also have the opportunity to learn in an applied setting through securing work placements within and outside the UK, helping to lay the foundations for your future career.

This course is at the forefront of craft-making practices and is for materially engaged makers who are looking to explore craft practices across a range of materials and object types. It encourages the development of craft across specialist and multi-material making, investigating and exploring definitions of contemporary craft practice.

The program is an opportunity to pursue a making practice that might already be located within a specific material area or object definition such as glass, ceramics, textiles or jewellery, or to develop and expand the definitions and materials of craft practice. The program supports the exploration of genre-breaking approaches to making, to develop individual and personal methodologies and philosophies, and locate these within a deep understanding of historical, contemporary and future craft-making practices, and wider social and cultural contexts.

With access to the wide range of hand, machine and digital technologies at Manchester School of Art, you will work within, across and between definitions of craft, to evolve and progress a unique and personal making practice. In addition to traditional material workshops across ceramics, hot and cold glass, metal, wood, textile print, weave and embroidery, there are digital making facilities for laser cutting, 3D printing, CNC routing, and digital print for textiles and ceramics, with access to specialist academic and technical expertise from across the School of Art, to support the development of a wide range of craft making practices.

Study geography at Manchester Met and you’ll begin with a good grounding in earth surface processes and landform development alongside society, culture, place and space. With a wide range of options in the later years of your geography degree, you can explore the issues and areas that interest you most.

While we have excellent teaching facilities on campus, we know that some of the most powerful lessons are learned outside the classroom. So, you’ll have ample opportunity to get involved in fieldwork trips around the UK and overseas, helping you develop and refine your practical skills. And, if you take the four-year route, you can spend a year either working on a placement or studying overseas before returning for your final year.

Along the way, you’ll explore key theories and concepts – and how they apply to geographical phenomena – while developing practical skills and techniques through field and laboratory work.

Placement options

• All of our geography degrees have been designed to be flexible. You can opt for the four-year placement degree route and spend Year 3 on a professional placement with a degree-related organisation.

BA (Hons) Fashion Design and Technology has an excellent reputation for producing menswear, womenswear and sportswear graduates who combine design innovation with an in-depth knowledge of the technical aspects of fashion design and manufacturing.

The course reflects contemporary industry standards and encourages students to design and develop innovative fashion products and ranges using both manual and digital technologies. Students work on live projects with industry partners and also have opportunity to undertake a placement and/or overseas study combined with a year in industry.

Students have the option to graduate with a Menswear, Womenswear or Sportswear award, by selecting specialist units in year two and three, or they can work across multiple specialisms. However, all students are encouraged to direct their learning towards specialized target markets such as luxury, outerwear, denim, tailoring, performance or lifestyle sportswear. The practical aspects of the course are underpinned by the study of the business and cultural contexts of fashion and consideration of sustainable industry practices.

Students work towards an exit portfolio that showcases their creative and technical skills appropriate to their chosen careers. While many graduates enter design roles, the technical aspects of the program also prepare students for other careers such as pattern cutting, fashion innovation and product development.

Placement options

Employability is at the heart of our teaching. All of our undergraduate courses offer an optional sandwich year route that gives you the opportunity to apply for an industry placement between your second and final year. Or to combine study abroad with one of our partner institutions and a placement. If you choose this route, you will commit to working full-time in the fashion industry during your third year, before returning to complete your degree in your fourth year.

A placement year is an incredibly valuable element of your course as it allows you to apply your university-based knowledge, skills and understanding to your job role. During your placement, you will make your own industry contacts and enhance your CV by gaining real-world industry experience. Around 40-50% of our student cohort take part in a one-year full-time industry placement/study abroad with placement annually.

We have a dedicated placements team with over three decades of experience sourcing and securing outstanding placement opportunities. They will provide you with extensive support and advice prior to and during your industry placement.

Placement or Placement with Study Abroad combined opportunities are available both in the UK and internationally, with students previously studying/working in countries such as Austria, Germany, Norway, Hong Kong SAR, China, Sri Lanka, India, Australia and the USA.

International marketing is vital for businesses to connect with their customers in an increasingly competitive, and rapidly evolving, marketplace. This course will give you the expertise necessary to thrive in this dynamic landscape.

You’ll gain the knowledge, technical and personal skills to operate across a range of dynamic and competitive international marketing environments.

We’ll provide you with knowledge from experts with extensive links to industry, people who understand what it takes to succeed in this field, plus leading researchers at the cutting edge of knowledge. Their expertise will help you develop an understanding of international marketing and how it’s applied in industry.

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.

From ancient civilizations and great empires, to terrible battles and the roots of our modern society, history is a vast landscape to explore and understand.

The past is part of our everyday lives, shaping our world profoundly. Study history and you won’t just learn about what happened in the past. You’ll develop a better understanding of the how and why of the events that make us who we are. In every period we study, our courses seek to develop different approaches and methods to understanding the past, embracing political, social, and cultural history. We foster the practice of history as an inclusive discipline, and recognise that powerful ideologies of race, gender and social status have shaped our past and our present. In other words – you won’t just discover the story, you’ll investigate and interpret its sources, impacts and meanings.

This degree program offers a roadmap for exploring the social and political landscape of human history. You’ll look at a huge variety of times and places – immersing yourself in wars, famine and poverty, charting technological leaps and social progress, and unearthing conspiracies, catastrophes and revolutions. And that’s just in your first year. In years two and three through your option unit choices, you'll have the opportunity to specialise and develop your interests further, and graduate with a degree title that reflects this: Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern, or American.

Staff researchers are constantly searching for new discoveries, fresh perspectives and unknown aspects of our history, bringing the past alive in the classroom. With this degree we give you the skills to understand the world and how this affects societal developments.

You may also have the opportunity to study abroad, including in the US, or spend your third year on placement in Britain or abroad.

Our BSc (Hons) Biology degree offers the chance to gain a solid grounding in the biological sciences – with the flexibility to develop your own interests and learn about the areas and aspects of biological sciences that match your career ambitions.

Study biology at Manchester Met and you’ll begin by learning the fundamentals of the subject, before exploring the areas that interest you most through a variety of option units. Along the way, you’ll explore the issues that shape our world and touch our lives – from molecular biology, microbiology and genetics, to ecology, animal behaviour, biodiversity and conservation.

The program also allows you to develop your own interests in areas such as comparative anatomy and physiology, plant science, brain and behaviour, population biology, biotechnology, biochemistry and the conservation of biodiversity, to tailor your learning to your career aspirations.

In our laboratories, you’ll get to grips with the latest equipment, as we help you develop a range of practical skills that you can take into your career. And, by getting out in the field, you can learn about biology out in the real world – whether in the UK or overseas.

Our biology degree also provides the option of spending an extra year expanding your horizons, either studying with one of our partner universities overseas, or working on a placement with a business or non-governmental organisation.

Placement options
The four-year placement route gives you the opportunity to spend your third year on a placement with a relevant employer, such as a conservation or environmental body, zoo or animal welfare organization, or with local government or a molecular diagnostics company. It’s a great chance to gain experience, build your network and develop transferable skills – all of which can boost your career prospects.