United Kingdom - England

This course develops students' advanced writing skills for academic attainment and employability. Students are introduced to key forms of writing from a variety of professional contexts. An initial focus on the academic essay enables students to develop writing from more familiar experience. Contrasting the academic essay with a variety of journalistic forms equips students with skills in writing to specific guidelines and briefs and craft their written voice. A project involving designing and promoting a virtual exhibition introduces students to the writing skills needed in heritage professions and group work. Real life writing and editing tasks introduced by industry professionals from the world of publishing provides students with practical experience to share with potential employers. Students are also introduced to the requirements of pitches, policy briefs, and the work of writing in the legal professions. 

The course is to introduce students to project management – as a concept, a practice, a skill and a key management resource in achieving organizational strategy and implementing change in organizations. This course focuses on planning and implementing projects that impact organizations, their strategic goals and their operations through business technologies. It also equips students with core knowledge about business technologies, which feature in a majority of graduate roles, along with confidence and skills to learn about these when students encounter them.

In this course, students learn to understand the basic background behind soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering and their importance and relevance in civil engineering; the importance of basic geology in civil engineering and learn about the three rock groups and origin of soils; classification of different type of soils; the principle of soil compaction and representing soil as a three-phase system; and the mechanics behind the flow of water through soils and to understand the concept of permeability of soils.

The course covers the fundamental principles of medical imaging, including the basics of the 4 major medical imaging methods: Ultrasound, X-Ray CT, PET, and MRI. The focus is on MRI and how it is used to capture the anatomy and function of the human brain. The course also provides hands-on experience with acquiring brain images using a 3T MRI scanner. Students learn how to process and characterize MRI images from healthy volunteers. Functional MRI (fMRI) data is used to learn the basics of statistical analysis used in neuroscience research. Students have the opportunity to interact with the MRI team and also with clinicians and neuroscientists who use the MRI for research.

This course builds on previous stress analysis courses by extending the concepts of linear elasticity to two and three dimensions, as the basis for advanced stress analysis. Topics covered include complex stresses and strains, Mohr’s circle, failure criteria, shear stresses in beams, thick-walled cylinders, plastic failure and buckling of struts. The course enables students to develop sufficient familiarity with stress analysis and strength of materials to design a safe and reliable load-bearing component of simple geometry (or to assess the safety of an existing one).

This course introduces students to an approach to politics which emphasizes a global perspective. Postcolonial studies moves beyond both International Relations, which tends to discuss relations between states or great powers, and Third World Studies, which isolates certain parts of  the world and discusses them separately. In contrast to a view of the world as split into the industrialized, developed West and the underdeveloped or developing South, what this course explores is the relationships between these two areas, seeing them as mutually constitutive: they produce each other. It examines how they have come to be produced as distinct, and how these differences are perpetuated as well as resisted through practices of development, race, gender, and neocolonialism. 

This course teaches the fundamental laws of thermodynamics and how they can be used to solve a range of simple engineering problems. The pace of the course takes account of students' lack of familiarity with the subject from pre-university studies. The aim of the lectures and tutorials is to develop analytical skills and some design appreciation, involving awareness of the interaction between thermodynamics and considerations of energy resources, materials, solid mechanics, economics, the environment, etc.

This course offers an introduction to the historical film genre by examining American, British, European, and Japanese films made during the past 20 years. It considers the debates surrounding the representation of history on film, and the influence and impact that historical films have on the public imagination and understanding of history. Students explore the aesthetic pleasures that historical films offer to audiences, as well as the wider public discussion and debate that historical films provoke among scholars, critics, and journalists in print and online. 

The course provides the key economic concepts and tools for analyzing environmental and urban issues; introduces and explains the application of economic methods to the analysis of the built and natural environments; presents the ways in which sound economic analysis is critical to urban and environmental policy making; and encourages critical debate and reflection on the key environmental and urban policy issues. 

This course reinforces students' previous knowledge of stress analysis, and extends this knowledge to more advanced theories and techniques, and to apply these to practical problems. Most of these are developments of methods which have been previously acquired but to more sophisticated problems. New areas of thermal stresses, plastic deformation and residual stresses are treated and a new technique of analysis using energy methods is also introduced and developed.