Master of Business Administration

at University of Buckingham United Kingdom

Well-functioning legal institutions are crucial to economic growth, development and more equitable distribution of resources. The connection between the legal system and the success of business has been shown repeatedly in the 20th Century.

The 2-year fast track programme offers a unique blend of business, economics and law covering micro and macro-economics, labour market economics, human rights law, corporate and business law, business management and business strategy.

We regularly host events and seminars where we discuss the latest research from our academics and invite speakers from the world of business and entrepreneurship.

Our academics offer a supportive, diverse and creative environment for you to explore your interests and ensure a successful educational experience. You will join an international community of students, staff and alumni.

A dedicated professional development course runs through the degree covering academic and job market skills. You will also benefit from internships and research opportunities in the Vinson Centre for Economics and Entrepreneurship.

Students taking this programme might be aiming to enter the legal profession by going on to take the Common Professional Examination and later specialise in areas of law such as anti-trust, securities regulation or taxation. Graduates can also move onto several master’s level programmes and is well suited to students who intend to take an MBA degree before entering business.

We are the beneficiaries of a substantial endowment from Nobel prize-winning economist Ronald Coase, who had a major specialism in the interface between Law and Economics and won the Nobel prize for that research. We offer several generous scholarships for students with a passion for Economics and Law. We especially encourage women and ethnic minorities to apply. Coase Scholarship details and eligibility criteria.

The unique structure of Buckingham’s Law and Criminology degree (LLB), with four full teaching terms per calendar year, enables you to graduate after just two years of study (eight, or nine terms with September start).

In addition to your legal studies, you will complete 120 units of criminology, allowing you to develop a deep and wide-ranging understanding of the origins, causes and consequences of crime and criminality. This includes knowledge and understanding of legal and criminological research methods, referencing protocols and the different primary and secondary sources of law. Criminology itself is an interdisciplinary subject comprised of the legal, social, psychological, and cultural aspects of crime.

The Law and Criminology degree also satisfies the necessary first step for qualifying as a lawyer in various common law jurisdictions, including Canada, Nigeria, the Bahamas, and Bermuda.

For those interested in qualifying as a solicitor in the UK, the Law and Criminology degree provides you with thorough preparation for the Solicitors Qualifying Exam 1 (SQE1), enabling you to choose the accelerated SQE1 preparation courses after graduation. Our innovative and diverse curriculum also contributes to preparation for the practice-orientated SQE2, both SQE1 and SQE2 being necessary for qualification as a solicitor.

For those UK and international students wishing to qualify as an English barrister, the Law and Criminology degree satisfies the academic component of Bar training, the necessary first step to qualifying as an English barrister.

Buckingham Law School also offers a broad range of extra-curricular opportunities to develop your professional skills and experience of legal practice. These opportunities include the possibility, between the first and second year of your LLB, of a sandwich year placement with a professional organisation.

We often accommodate the particular requirements needed to practise in various common law jurisdictions other than the UK. If you are an international student from one of these jurisdictions, we are happy to discuss what subjects you must take to qualify.

Our Law and Criminology graduates who gain a second-class honours degree, or higher, are guaranteed a place on our LLM programme in International and Commercial Law. This opportunity greatly enhances specialist knowledge and enables our students to acquire two degrees in only three years.

BA History is one of the five most popular subjects among UK university students, and with good reason. Having a historical perspective enables people to make sense of today’s rapidly changing world. Employers like it because history teaches you to think for yourself, to work under pressure, and to construct a coherent argument from the evidence. Historical research has never been more exciting than it is today, with the internet making available so many treasures from the archives.

This BA History programme has been carefully designed and fine-tuned by Buckingham’s team of experienced and high-calibre historians. It offers an outline and conceptual modules which concentrate on the period from 1800 to the present day – though we do study some earlier periods too from the 1500s onwards too.  It covers, in particular, empires, the rise in political polarisation, World Wars and the shaping of our modern political systems, whilst considering the relationship between ideology and the historical process.

Students progress to study the history of history and to reflect on historical method. In the last part of the course, we study historical documents and texts and develop research and writing skills through a long essay and a dissertation. So the programme not only teaches history; it also teaches you to think historically and to research and write history.

History Flexible (BA) Honours option
Make your degree as unique as you! If you choose BA History (Flexible Honours) you’ll have the freedom to tailor your History degree to reflect your interests and passions by combining it with a wide range of other subjects taught here at the University. This means that when you graduate you will have a highly personalised degree that will suit you and your aspirations perfectly.

If you choose Flexible Honours you have the freedom to select up to a third of your modules from the whole range of what is taught at the University. This means you can mix and match lots of different subjects ?with History. At every stage, your Personal Tutor will be on hand to advise and guide your choices.

BSc Psychology with French gives you the skill of another language which is a great advantage to have excellent. The BSc Psychology with French course is a great option  for anyone interested in psychology who wants the opportunity of learning the french language to a high level. See our course Psychology pages for further information on what the Psychology part of the degree will cover.

This programme aims to engage energetic and motivated Mathematics students in innovative research in pure Mathematics and its application in Computer Science. The programme is suitable for students with a solid background in Mathematics or in a closely related discipline. This programme, in particular, is a stepping stone for students to join research institutes and universities as PhD students and researchers.

Some of our research projects will seek new directions towards neural networks and AI, and potentially towards industrial application. The significance of interdisciplinary research is emphasised in the UK’s Research and Development Roadmap, which includes innovative proposals for interactions between mathematical sciences, biomedical research, and the Computing industry.

The main research areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Model theory is a branch of mathematical logic, and its applications in a wide range of subjects such as algebra, topological dynamics, combinatorics, and theoretical Computer Science. Specifically, the projects are focused on Fraïssé construction method, automorphism groups of countable homogeneous structures, structural Ramsey theory, asymptotic classes, ultraproducts, and infinite constraint satisfaction problems in theoretical Computer Science. Research proposals in a wider range of areas in mathematical logic, philosophy of Mathematics, pure Mathematics and theoretical Computer Science are also welcome. These include research areas such as formal methods, type theory, set theory, higher-order logics and fuzzy logics.
• Applied Computational Topology and Geometry is a relatively recent and fast-growing field of mathematics that emerged from applying well-established theories in algebraic topology and geometry. Specific projects focus on applications of data-driven Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the fields of computer vision, medical diagnostics, and multimedia security for image tampering and fake videos. These applications employ Topological Data Analysis (TDA) and its growing list of tools (Persistent Homology, Mapper, etc.) to infer relevant (topological) class discriminating features from high dimensional and complex data. Other projects involve the use of TDA for interpreting Deep Learning (DL) decisions and dealing with the problem of overfitting of DL models.

Throughout the project, students will interact and be encouraged to work with other researchers at the University of Buckingham and other leading research universities in the UK. The students will be part of research networks such as BPGMTC, SEEMOD, MODNET and Data Science groups.

The University of Buckingham’s Master’s programme in Country House Studies offers the opportunity to pursue research at Master’s level in any one of a wide range of country-house-related topics: from explorations of individual houses and their architects and decorators, to studies of their social and political use, and the role of the country house in literature and film.

Individual research topics are closely focused; but the approach of the course is to encourage students to investigate the interconnections between the country house’s multiple facets and roles, rather than to examine it in exclusively architectural-historical terms. Recent dissertations have surveyed, for example, the Baroque mural in country house decoration; the use of music in the country houses during the 1650s; and the professionalisation of the sale of country estates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The choice of subject area is ultimately the student’s own.

The MA is awarded solely on the basis of the dissertation (there are no ‘exams’), and the relationship between you and your supervisor is therefore at the heart of the course. The maximum length for the MA dissertation recommended by the School of Humanities is 25,000 words (or approximately 75 pages at line-spacing of 1.5), excluding notes and references. Student and supervisor meet regularly on a one-to-one basis to discuss, plan, and review the dissertation as it develops through the year.

BSc Psychology with English Literature looks at the discoveries and hypotheses of psychologists who over the last 100 years have been enriching the study of English literature, either as a way of understanding the mind of the artist or of the characters they create. Studying BSc Psychology with English Literature at Buckingham as with English Literature as your minor subject, gives you the chance to ‘apply’ the insights which the scientific study of individual and group psychology provides to a range of powerful and enigmatic works of literature, from the plays of Shakespeare, through the Gothic and Romantic projections of the late 18th-century, to the short stories and novels of British and American women writers writing in a post-Freudian universe.

Both subjects require the close analysis of texts (spoken, written, uttered) and the discipline of clear report and essay-writing. Their combination in this programme gives you the imaginative scope of an arts programme with the vocation and professionalism of a Bachelor of Science degree.

With military history one of the fastest-growing areas of academic study, the University of Buckingham introduced a one-year MA in Military History, by research, in 2009. This is a groundbreaking programme: the first one-year Research MA in Military History, and the first with an integral course of seminars by visiting lecturers of international repute. The programme was enthusiastically reviewed by The Financial Times, which noted that “Intellectually curious professionals are signing up for a new course that gives them the opportunity to exchange thoughts on security, diplomacy and the armed forces over dinner with stellar historians and military top brass.”

The programme is London-based and directed by one of the country’s finest military historians, Professor Gary Sheffield. The lectures offered by the Course Director will be supplemented by a series of ten guest seminars by some of the most eminent scholars and authors in the field, including Professors N.A.M. Rodger, Sir Hew Strachan, Richard Overy, Sir Richard J. Evans, David Reynolds, Saul David, and Sir Antony Beevor.

BA Modern Languages  will develop your linguistic competence in both French and Spanish and gain an in-depth knowledge and understanding of their cultures, communities and societies.

Languages are taught at Intermediate Level (stages 3-6) and Advanced Level (stages 5–8). Students will also have the opportunity to undertake a dissertation project and/or, subject to availability, an external work placement in France and/or Spain.

Upon completion students will have a range of transferable skills directly relating to employability, as well as developing their communication, critical and analytical skills. It is designed for students who wish to work in a range of careers or pursue further studies within an international context or related to international institutions.

 Modern Languages ( BA) Flexible Honours
Make your degree as unique as you! If you choose BA Modern Languages (Flexible Honours) you’ll have the freedom to tailor your Modern Languages degree to reflect your interests and passions by combining it with a wide range of other subjects taught here at the University. This means that when you graduate you will have a highly personalised degree that will suit you and your aspirations perfectly.

If you choose Flexible Honours you have the freedom to select up to a third of your modules from the whole range of what is taught at the University. This means you can mix and match lots of different subjects ?with Modern Languages. At every stage, your Personal Tutor will be on hand to advise and guide your choices.

The academic staff in the Applied Computing Department (ACD) are all engaged in research and publications. Considering its modest size, ACD has successfully attracted research funding from various sources in the UK and the EU, including industry, research councils, HEA and EU framework projects such as FP6. Furthermore, ACD has been working and collaborating with many European research institutions.

For the academic year, 2012-2013, two PhD and six MSc students (one in Mathematics) have graduated, four of whom graduated with Distinction. The two PhD students have made it for the March graduation and we expect to have three or four more completing their PhD research programmes for the next graduation. One of our new PhD students in Computing joined the Department last October, and three other PhD students have joined us since. Over the last few years, the number of research students in ACD has grown steadily to (currently) 29 PhD and two Master’s research students.

We have had over 20 refereed conference and journal papers published during the last 12 months, and two of the papers have been awarded best paper awards.

ACD supports diverse research topics addressing varied applied computing technologies such as:

• Image processing and pattern recognition with applications in biometric-based person identification, image super-resolution, digital watermarking and steganography, content-based image/video indexing and retrieval, biomedical image analysis.
• Multi-factor authentication and security algorithms.
• Wireless networks technologies (Multi-frequency Software-Defined / Cognitive Radios, convergence and integration of different wireless technologies and standards such as WiFi and WiMax, IPv4 and IPv6, wireless mesh technologies, intrusion detection and prevention, efficiency and stability of ad hoc networks).
• Hybrid navigation and localisation integrations for mobile handsets, including using Cellular and WiFi in conjunction with GPS and Glonass for seamless positioning indoors, Multiplexed receive chain of GPS/Glonass with on-board handset Bluetooth/WiFi, GNSS signals multiplexing for real-time simulation.
• Cloud computing, including the readiness of mobile operating systems for cloud services and focusing on techniques for fast computing handovers, efficient virtualisation and optimised security algorithms.
• Data mining techniques, including database systems, the application of data mining techniques in image and biological data, human-computer interaction and visual languages.
• Research and development of Apps for mobile devices and smart TVs, particularly for application in the areas of education and healthcare.
• Differential geometry – Einstein metrics, quasi-Einstein metrics, Ricci solitons, numerical methods in differential geometry.

As well as researching the chosen subject, our students engage in delivering seminars weekly, attending conferences and workshops, attending online webinars and discussion forums, attending training and focused group studies, supervising tutorial and laboratory sessions for undergraduate students, peer reviews and final year project supervision, among a host of technical and networking activities to enhance their skills and techniques.