Course summary

This course is about understanding ourselves as humans. It explores what makes us human at multiple levels including from our biology and our psychology, to our behaviours. It also addresses the responsibility that comes with being human. A responsibility none of us asked for as individuals, but which we collectively bear as the only species on earth that can act as potential guardians or destroyers of our planet and its ecosystems. The programme follows an exciting interdisciplinary structure that combines topics including genetics, sociology, psychology, evolutionary biology, biochemistry, neuroscience and anthropology. This is coupled with understanding the past and ongoing impact of the human race and the human condition on ecosystems and the planet. The programme combines core elements in years one and two but also allows you, and importantly supports you, to follow individual pathways informed by your interests and what fascinates you. Why study this course?

• Innovative interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Human Sciences is an innovative programme that draws on teaching and research expertise from the four Schools that make up the College of Life and Environmental Sciences. As such the course brings a unique and rich interdisciplinary viewpoint to bear on the topics that you will study.

• Learn from multimodal research performed at different scales. The Schools that collectively deliver this course use very different research approaches reflecting their different disciplines. This programme will provide you with a unique insight to these different approaches, but also what fundamentally unites them and how they can be brought together to address major local and global challenges. You will spend time in individual research groups and laboratories across these different disciplines as well as learning about research exploring large scale multi-million-pound infrastructures.

• Outstanding employability opportunities. The needs for global action are changing the graduate employment market in real time. New roles are arising in companies from new start-ups to global corporations as well as in agencies (such as WHO, UNICEF, UN), in NGOs, forestry, agriculture, governments, law, education, research, journalism, and broadcasting. This programme has been designed in response to these growing employment needs and will equip you to be able to become one of the next generation of leaders, innovators, policy makers, teachers, and researchers at forefront of tackling global challenges.

• Opportunity for training in innovation and company start up. Perhaps you may feel that during your studies you have identified a gap in the market and have an idea for a start-up company of your own. An option in the final year is to take modules in learning entrepreneurial skills and entrepreneurial start-up.

• Glacial eco-systems field trip. An optional second-year module is a field trip to Norway to study glacial ecosystems and how these are threatened by human global impacts.