This is the transcript for the video Postgraduate Science and Maths – Course Info
Hi, everyone, and welcome to this information video about postgraduate coursework in science and maths here at UTS in the Faculty of Science. My name’s Bernadette Saunders and I’m the Director of Postgraduate Coursework Programs here in the Faculty of Science. And it’s my pleasure to be able to take you through this session to tell you a little bit about postgraduate science at UTS and why this may be a great option for you.
So in this video, we’ll talk about what his postgraduate education here at UTS in the Faculty of Science. We’ll go through a little overview of some of the different subjects that we have on offer for you, some essential information and how to apply. So why postgraduate science or maths here at UTS? In the Faculty of Science, we’ve worked really hard to develop postgraduate opportunities for you that will help you develop the real world skills that you need to succeed in your preferred discipline. We’ve developed a combination in degrees of both scientific disciplines, specific skills and more general, broad professional skills that we’ve been told by our employers are really important for the new staff, things like being able to communicate effectively across multiple teams and having innovation, commercialisation and project management skills. We’ve developed our coursework to have a real flexible approach. We have a mix of face to face and online content. We structure our courses so that we have lots of evening classes for all our compulsory subjects. So that enables you, if you’re working full time to do that and still continue with your postgraduate education. And we have some fantastic world class facilities, laboratories, super lab, crime scene, simulation lab. We have great proteomics facilities, flow cytometry facilities, and we have a new PC-2 certified Hive Superlab, which provides you an opportunity to develop skills and to learn to operate, run and understand the latest technology and instrumentation. We have our postgraduate courses are designed to allow you to undertake research with world leading researchers, with academics who are leading experts in the fields of forensics, proteomics, medical, biotechnology, infectious diseases. At UTS, we are ranked above world standard in all our scientific disciplines. We have lots of industry connections as well. And within our postgraduate courses, there’s an opportunity to learn from our industry experts, to interact with them, to take internships. We work with lots of research partners across New South Wales, Sydney and Australia. People like the Australian Federal Police work closely and hand in our forensics department. So how does it work here in your postgraduate study, you get to choose the level of study you’d like to enrol in.
That could be from a Graduate Certificate, which is twenty-four credit points and can be completed full time in one semester through to the Master’s Extension or the Master of Philosophy, which are ninety-six credit point subjects, which offerings it will take two years full time to complete. So what we do here, we have a mixture in subjects of both professional and discipline specific skills that you need to develop the master’s course, which is our standard course is seventy-two credit points, and that’s a year and a half full time. And that has a mix, as I said, of both professional and discipline, specific subjects for you and some electives depending on what area you choose. The Master’s Extension is ninety-six credit points and that’s two years full time. That’s designed for people who either need to develop some basic skills before they can move into some of the master’s subjects or who want to take an extra research project or would like to take some sessions with Faculty of Science and perhaps do a unit or a semester in business or a semester in the Graduate School of Health, depending on their interests and what expertise they’d like to develop. The Master of Philosophy is our degree that you do an internal course transfer into. So in the Master Philosophy, you do a year of coursework and you complete all the core components for your master’s project, the subjects that you’re interested in.
And then after a year you do an internal course transfer and for your second year you do a full time research project with a supervisor. So to get into the Master of Philosophy, you need to have at least a good credit average in your first year. And then we’ll help you find a suitable supervisor who’s offering a project that you’re interested in doing and your second year as a research project. And you write a thesis up at the end. And that’s a design to allow people to get extra experience in undertaking research. For people who are interested in moving into research, you can use this to apply for scholarships for your PhD or to move into working in a research field. So there are lots of options for you, depending on how you want to move into your postgraduate study. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the different degrees that we have in areas. So medical biotechnologies particularly, is a huge growth field. People who undertake this degree move into a range of areas. This could be in public health systems. It could be working in hospital and government departments. It can be a diagnostic labs, pharmaceutical and biotech companies in full time research positions.
And we’ve designed our medical technology course to give you lots of experience in these areas. So you’ll undertake advanced studies in microscopy and flow cytometry, proteomics genetics, designing experiments. And there are a number of admission requirements which are pretty common to all degrees. You need to have an undergraduate degree in an area of science such as biology, microbiology, food science, biotechnology, lots of areas. And this degree will really give you a broad range of skills that are highly sought after in a range of different fields, depending on what you’re interested in going into. Here at UTS, we have an amazing forensic science department, it really is world class and our Master of Forensic Science is designed for people who want to move into the speciality as students get jobs working with the police forensic laboratories, both state and federal, they can work in government or private forensic laboratories, drug detection. They move into Customs and Border Protection, environmental protection, a whole heap of careers. So the forensic science degree here is really designed to help you develop advanced forensic specialization in things like investigating crime scenes, toxicology, criminal criminalistics, forensic inference and interpretation. And again, you will need a bachelor’s degree in a scientific area, particularly with some chemistry or something in that area to help you understand and to cope with this Master’s.
And the Master of Quantitative Finance is really designed for those people who want it’s a high end specialist mathematics degree, so this could be for risk management, for analysis, people who are working for governments, for banks, for investment companies, all these sorts of areas. So this is really a mathematical speciality in the finance area. So for this degree, you’ll need a background qualification in mathematics. As of 2021, we will be offering a new Master of Mathematics and Quantitative Finance, and that will be a two year course on offer for individuals who may come in and need a little bit more mathematics before they can move into doing a Master of Quantitative Finance. So that degree will be offered as of 2021. The Master of Science is a more generalist degree. There’s a number of sub majors you can take in that degree Biomedical Engineering, Marine Science, Mathematics, or as I mentioned, the no specific major for those who want to choose from a range of areas and really have a pick and mix and really choose and tailor their Master of Science for what they’re most interested in. All our Master’s have a common theme to them. We have twenty four credit points of professional subjects, and these are a range of subjects that are designed to teach you skills that you need to be able to succeed in your careers.
And these were designed after a lot of consultation with industry and employers, the sorts of things that you need, such as being able to project manage, understanding data, understanding statistics, being able to communicate in an academic and advanced level. So advanced communication science is a really critical subject to help you teach some of those skills. And those professional subjects really complement the major, the choice of the major that you make and the technical and discipline specific subjects that you’ll take as well. In our Master of Science, there are a number of submajors, as I mentioned, Biomedical Engineering and this course is really designed for people who may come in with engineering skills. So you may take the biomedical stream to help teach the biology that you haven’t picked up in your engineering area or the physical science stream. So biologists often take that strain to give them some more engineering understanding of physical science to work in that field of biomedical engineering. And again, this is a great growth field, lots of careers in developing medical devices and new technologies and also the option to work for government in policy, in hospitals and research laboratories and similar qualifications and specialisation required to get in. So you will need that undergraduate degree in science or engineering.
Marine Science and Management, so we definitely need marine scientists to help us save our oceans and these work in both public and private sectors.
They can work in conservation with fisheries, environmental sustainability and tourism. And again, this is another big growth area. One of the nice things about this course is that you get to do a capstone project. And by that I mean it’s taught at the Sydney Institute of Marine Scientists, it’s taught across universities. And you’ll be taught by experts from across universities in Sydney to really help you develop your understanding of marine science and how we manage our oceans and our fisheries. And again, this is another course where you’ll need a bachelor’s degree with some qualifications in an area such as ecology, marine science, environmental science.
And Mathematics and Statistical Modelling is a degree that sits alongside a quantitative finance degree. And again, mathematics. We know that there’s a huge shortage of mathematicians out there. They work in a range of fields, banking, finance, health, market research, information technology and education fields. So in this course, you get to tailor the area of mathematics or statistics you’re interested in. And there are a number of subjects that you get to choose from. For those who aren’t sure what they want to do or they want to take a range of different subjects across multiple different disciplines, you can enrol in the Master of Science and tailor that. So you’ll do professional subjects and then you’ll have lots of disciplines, specific choices about which options you want to take for your Master’s course.
So, as I mentioned, at postgraduate degrees can be a pathway to go on to PhD study. And most people do that by completing the Master of Philosophy. So as I mentioned, you do a year of coursework. So that’s the master’s in the Master’s Extension. And then you apply for an internal course transfer into the Master of Philosophy and your second year, your second forty eight credit points where you do your research project and you spend the year in the laboratory in one of our research labs, you work on your own project and you write the thesis off at the end. And of course, as I mentioned, you need to have a credit average for that. And this will really help to develop your research skills and help with employment opportunities in research, in clinical trial areas or enable you to go on to further study. So there are fees, so the fees for domestic students per credit point, so on average, one full year is forty eight credit points and there’s a fee calculator that you can use to help you look at the fees. There are some scholarships available and scholarships information, again, can be found online at scholarships.uts.edu.au. Now, some of you may have studied postgraduate education or have some equivalent degree of learning, and we do do recognition of prior learning for individuals. And that’s always done on a case by case basis.
So there’s some information on the website there for you. And if you have any questions, you can contact the staff at science to have those answered. And of course, there are English language requirements. So you need an IELTS overall of 6.5 with at least a 6.0 in your writing. And again, there’s a website there to enable you to access all that information. So if you’re interested, if you’re a local student, you can apply online. And again, if you click on that link, it’ll take you to the applications. And applications will open in September 2020 for 2021. And if you’re an international student, you can also submit your application online and the link is there as well. We’ll be having live postgraduate coursework opportunities. The next one coming up will be on Thursday 3 September. And what will happen there is you’ll be able to come online and talk to our course directors and talk to current students about what it’s like to study UTS. And if you’ve got some specific questions, that’s a great opportunity for you to get those answered. These booked out quite early last time. So I encourage you to get in and booked yourself a time to come in and have a chat with this. So thanks for listening. And I hope we see what UTS in your future studies.