Course summary

Our year in industry programme with a specialism in information security will give you a strong foundation of knowledge, skills and practical experience to kickstart your career. Your work placement in year 3 will give you skills and awareness that can be refined in a real work environment and will help to set you apart when you apply for jobs. The creation, transmission and storage of huge volumes of electronic data is one of the defining features of our age. It brings us untold benefits but it also exposes businesses, governments and individuals to repeated threats. We increasingly rely on the expertise and innovations of information security specialists, without which many aspects of our daily lives would grind to a halt. You could be one of them. This four-year programme will equip you to manage and improve the smooth running and security of systems, applications and organisations. You will learn from leading researchers in the field, covering topics such as cryptography, computer security, fraud detection and the study of how security itself can best be managed. All this will be underpinned by a solid grounding in the fundamentals of computing and application development. From the outset, you will be experimenting with programming games, robots, Gadgeteer kits, Subversion, JUnit testing, Scrum-based Agile software and more, in our well-equipped laboratories. Your year in industry will start at the end of year 2. We are located in the famous M4 corridor, known as 'England's Silicon Valley', and we enjoy close links with many of its leading technology companies. If you are unable to go ahead with your placement you will have the option of transferring onto our equivalent three-year BSc programme. Alongside our core modules you will have the flexibility to tailor your studies to your own interests in your final year. We are a highly respected, research-focused department with a friendly approach and award-winning teaching. We offer a summer work placement programme and a dedicated personal adviser to guide you through your studies. You will also be welcome to join our thriving Computing Society. We are one of only seven departments in the UK to hold the Athena SWAN bronze award for our commitment to increasing female participation in computer science. Both the BSc and the MSci have received provisional certification by GCHQ (full certification will be received when the first cohorts graduate). Our Information Security Group (ISG) is a world-leading interdisciplinary research centre, and an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR). We sponsor the Cyber Security Challenge, a series of national online competitions that test the cyber security abilities of teams from all walks of life. You will have access to our virtualisation software for experimenting with network security settings and ideas, as well as to our Penetration Testing Laboratory and industry-sponsored Smart Card Centre.