Visitors to last year’s Bloomsbury Festival chatting with CASA researchers about their work
Roll up, roll up! The first annual Bartlett postgraduate open day takes place on March 27th 2013, and now’s the time for prospective Masters’ students to grab their free tickets before they all get snapped up!
The event is geared towards people who are considering studying a Master’s (postgraduate) degree at the Bartlett (these are usually completed in one year, or longer if you study part-time). If you’re not fully up to speed with UCL institutional structure, the Bartlett is the UCL Faculty of the Built Environment – meaning that it’s the parent organisation for a whole host of departments who are interested in cities, buildings and, well, building.
Obviously one of those CASA, where I work – we’re interested in cities, technologies and analysing space, whether it be the city, the country, or the world. We’ll be at the fair to talk about our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation.The degree is designed to teach students about spatial modelling, visualisation and analysis, leading on to a student-led research project.
The Bartlett will shortly have a very useful page describing the differences between the various masters degrees, but for now, and in a nutshell:
An MRes is a research masters, meaning that at least 50% of it is based on a research topic that you select and write a dissertation on. There are fewer taught classes than MScs (see below). These degrees are great if you want to do future research in academia or industry, and are useful to demonstrate originality and independence. On our MRes there is both a group visualisation project and a larger individual research project, so you’ll get used to working in a team and individually.
An MSc is much more based on taught material, with some independent research. The Sc stands for “science” so requires some investigation and experimentation. CASA doesn’t currently run an MSc but plans to in the future.
An MA is like an MSc, but for Arts instead of Science. I’m not quite sure what they actually involve, I imagine a lot more book learning and hours in the library staring wistfully at other postgrads*. Doesn’t sound half bad.
Finally, an MArch is an architecture degree geared more towards design outputs and typically more portfolio-focussed. This is very much for architect-designers as opposed to urban geographers and data wranglers.
The Bartlett is a diverse place, and while I’d warmly encourage you to focus your academic brainpower on the CASA stall, there will also be people from the BSGS (who bring innovative computational techniques to design and architecture), the Energy Institute (looking at energy demand in the home and economy), the Institute for Sustainable Resources (a spinout of the Energy Institue), the Development Planning Unit (studying international development, aid, planning and building), Heritage Science (preserving historic artefacts) as well as the larger groups of Architecture (designing buildings), Planning (working out where they go), and Construction and Project Management (making sure they get built).*
If you’re reading this you’re probably most curious about CASA – I’ll be there talking about our research and the MRes, along with CASA lecturers Hannah Fry and James Cheshire, and former students Robin Edwards and Flora Roumpani, who can tell you how fascinating a CASA Masters Degree can be.
See you there!
*that’s a massive oversimplification
Sociable Physics 