This is the transcript for the video Bachelor of Science (Flexible) & Bachelor of Advanced Science – Course Info
Hi, everyone, welcome to this video, which is going to go through some information about The Bachelor of Science, Flexible Majors and The Bachelor of Advanced Science, for more information about our courses, please do head to our website, science.uts.edu.au/future. So I’d like to welcome you to this presentation. My name is Dr. Scott Chadwick and I am the director of undergraduate programs here at UTS Science. So before I get into the details on the different types of courses that we have, I thought I just might talk to you a little bit about why you might want to consider choosing maths and science at UTS. One of the best things about studying here at UTS is that you are gaining real world skills. So in your studies, you are going to get some hands on experience, on instruments and experiments and getting your hands dirty, doing practical exercises. You might be doing field trips depending on your course, and we really want you to develop those skills that are going to be helpful for you once you leave university. Some of it is done in sort of classroom general sort of structure. But we also have our students working on research projects and internships during their study, and it’s all there to develop your skills you’ll apply once you leave university. All the academics here at UTS are researchers and they’re very active in their field of study.
So these are the people that will be teaching you in your classes. So you’re getting the cutting edge and most up to date information in all of your subjects. The facilities that we have at UTS are world class. We have some of the best laboratories in the country. We have two super labs that every student will have the opportunity to conduct their experiments in. And we also have very specialised facilities for different areas. So, for instance, if you’re interested in studying forensic science, we have a crime scene simulation suite, if you’re interested in medical science you might have access to our anatomy laboratories. If you’re into physics, you might have access to our micro-structural analysis unit, which has electron microscopes and a lot of cutting edge technologies that you as a student will have the opportunity to get your hands on. The good advantage of UTS, it is a city campus, which means we’re a lot, we’re quite close to the central business district and a whole lot of different industries, whether they be private or government. And because we’re so close to them, we’re able to have quite strong connections with industry to help our students. So there could be some opportunities for you to work on research projects with other companies outside of UTS, but also potentially having an internship at one of those companies. The research that we do, we are a university that is there for the public good, so our research is one that has impact across a whole range of different areas.
So not just in the academic sense, but also in the community and the public arena. So. As I said, the researchers here are doing some very exciting things at the cutting edge of their areas, and there may be the opportunity for you as a student to get your hands in to some of those laboratories and work on some of those discoveries yourself. So just to give you a bit of a breakdown of the different types of courses or degrees that UTS science offers, the first sort of courses, the ones I’m going to focus mostly on today, and that’s how Bachelor of Science (Flexible) or Bachelor of Science with a particular major. So this is just a regular Bachelor of Science course or you can choose to major in a particular discipline. The goal of this particular course is to give you a solid foundation of knowledge and skills across a broader area. So even though you will choose a major that will give you those disciplines specific skills, we really want to focus on giving you those broad cross disciplinary skills that are going to be essential regardless of if you stay in the particular area of interest or you move out into different career paths.
The next type of degree is a Bachelor degree with a name. So, for instance, we have a Bachelor of Biomedical Science, Bachelor of Medical Science, Bachelor of Forensic Science. These are more specialised degrees that give students an opportunity to take a little bit more of a deeper dive into that specific course area. Generally, we find that students who have an interest or a passion for a particular science may be drawn to these sorts of courses. You are still getting a solid foundation in some of the fundamental sciences, but it is very much taught through a discipline specific lens. Then the other type of degree are our combined degrees, so we do have a number of Bachelor of Science or named degrees that you can pair up with another degree across the university. So we will offer double degrees for some of our courses with areas such as business, arts and international studies, Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation, Engineering and more. So please do head to our website to find out what courses can be paired up with another course if you are interested in doing one of the combined courses. The goal for that is to give you the fundamentals in science, but also the fundamentals in that other specialisation as well. So it’s sort of like a two for one deal for those ones. As I said for today’s presentation, I’m going to be focusing mainly just on our Bachelor of Science and the different majors that we have there.
So The Bachelor of Science (Flexible) is a little bit like a choose your own adventure type of course. When you enrol in this course, you will need to identify whether you want to go into the more of the life and environmental sciences stream or more in the physics or chemistry stream. What is good about this course is that in the first year it is very common. They have a lot of subjects that overlap with each other. So if you do find that you choose one major what you want to maybe move into another one, it is quite easy for you to change between them. You just need to just sort of shift your subjects around after that first year. That’s where you will then choose into your particular areas. And that’s where you get quite a lot of choice in terms of the subjects that you you take. That’s why we call it the flexible major, because you are the one that are driving your own subject choice. So, for instance, if you’re in the life and environmental sciences stream, rather than just having environmental subjects, you might want to take a, pick from some biology and anatomy subjects while you do some environmental. Having that sort of pick and mix of a whole range of different subjects could make you more interdisciplinary in your skills and your knowledge. Similarly, if you choose the physics or chemistry stream again, you may choose some, slightly mix of subjects, bit of physics, bit of chemistry, a bit of maths so that you can fill out your program there.
This is really good if you really like science, but you’re not quite sure where your interest lies and you just want to have a little bit of a taste of everything and then you can really start to focus in those second and third years. So that’s the flexible major, has a lot of choice and a lot of options as part of that course. The Bachelor of Science with particular majors, so again, this has a very similar first year, where you have life and environmental streams, the physics and chemistry streams will be doing a lot of similar subjects. The mathematics science stream is a little bit different, but I’ll talk about that a bit later. So you choose your particular stream. You’ll have your first year with a foundation of chemistry, biology, mathematics or statistics, some physics just to give you that solid foundation. And then in your second and third year, that is where you will move into your specific majors. So in the life and environmental sciences stream, you have majors in biotechnology, biomedical science, medical science and environmental science. For the physics or chemistry, you have applied physics, chemistry or nanotechnology, and then for the mathematics sciences stream, you have mathematics and statistics. So these particular measures will then have a particular set of subjects that you will need to complete.
So there is still quite a bit of flexibility in terms of the subjects that you choose, and there’s a lot of choice in them, but it is a little bit more prescribed compared to a flexible major that I spoke about previously. So this gives you a little bit more direction in a particular field compared to the flexible major. So what I’m going to do now, I’m just going to go through some of these different majors to explain a little bit about them so that you can have a bit more of an idea on the types of things you’ll be doing and then where you might end up with that particular course. So within the life sciences stream, we have the biotechnology majors. So this is really just, I mean, it says it all in the name. There’s a combination of biology and technology, and it’s the application to improve human health and the environment. So some of the things that people who have a biotechnology qualification, they might be working on new vaccines or medicines for companies like AstraZeneca or Pfizer, they could be using genomics data to usher in a new era of drug discovery. They could be using environmental components such as algae to test its ability for food, energy, light, these whole bunch of different applications, taking, you know, the environment and applying it to a new sphere.
That’s kind of what bio, biotechnology is about. It’s taking the biological processes that we know and understand and trying to see if there are any possible technological applications that might be suitable for that. In terms of where some of our graduates do end up, they do end up in some sort of research type of roles, such as, you know, CSIRO or a medical research area. There are biotechnology, there’s quite a lot of start ups and small businesses that operate in this particular area, like AusBiotech or so there’s small biotechnology firms, larger pharmaceutical companies, as I said, like AstraZeneca, are also looking for biotechnology graduates, particularly because of their knowledge around, you know, vaccines and things like that. And there are other areas such as Kelly Scientific, Accenture Australia, where biotechnology skills are required or desirable for their business. The biomedical science major is one that focuses very much on the cellular and molecular level of biology. It’s where students will learn about tissue cells and how the body works on a microscopic scale to then understand how it works, how we can help in terms of diseases and help people moving forward. So some of the sort of key aims of a biomedical science student that you’ll be learning is to detect, diagnose and treat disease on the cellular level and manage human health and then also potentially be working as a vaccine researcher to prevent the global spread of diseases, which is quite topical given the current environment that we are in.
The careers, as I said, are quite broad for this is well. You know, we could be moving into sort of a research type of role for hospitals to like a hospital scientist. There is a strong focus here on pathology in this particular course. So pathology labs like the Australian Red Cross Blood Service. Then there are also some other areas where, again, human health and potential diseases or occupational health and safety are of a concern so that places like the New South Wales Fire Brigade or WorkSafe Victoria and again, just like our biotechnology, the biomedical sciences major may also work in large pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer. The final biological based major that we have in this case is the medical science major, so whereas the biomedical focuses very much on the cellular level, medical science focuses very much on the macro level or the human body level. Within this course, you’ll get to learn and appreciate a whole, the whole body medicine, how body systems work together, how diseases might affect different parts of the body, the sort of physiological aspects associated with diseases and just general human health. Some potential areas that people with a medical science might move into is working as a nutritionist, to help optimise people’s health, to diagnose certain conditions, they could be an operating theatre technician. Again, it’s very much a focus on the whole body as opposed to the cellular level. Because we’re focused very much on the human and body aspect of it, a lot of our graduates will move into employment in the hospital type of areas across Australia and New South Wales, or there is also the opportunity for them to move into sort of research areas such as the Australian Genomic Research Facility. And this is also a potential pathway if any students do want to look at taking sort of further study. This does provide some foundation for the medical sciences area. Then in the environmental stream, we do have the environmental sciences major. And this is, again, really important given the current environment that we are living in. We want the students in this particular major to understand how different ecological systems will work with each other and work with humans and try to find solutions that can help protect, remediate and enhance the world that we live in. A really great point about this particular course is because you are learning about the environment and the best way to learn is to get out there and get your hands on experience. This sort of major will have or has had quite a lot of field trips in the past giving you that opportunity to get into the environment and learn in that particular space.
In terms of areas where people might be moving into, they might work as an environmental consultant or an analyst for a range of different companies, it could be for the government or it could be for different sectors. Or you could be working with our National Parks and Wildlife Service as. Well, the type of career path or where people end up after they graduate because of our course is focused sort of both on the land sea environment, as well as the animal, both land and marine animal, they do tend to find careers if they’re more in the animal focused Taronga Zoo and aquarium, sea life aquarium, all the sorts of places. But if they’re more focused in the land environment side of things, then they might be working for the Environmental Protection Agency, Sydney Water or the Office of Environment and Heritage. The mathematical sciences stream, so we do have mathematics and statistics majors now, this is a really interesting major because more and more there is a demand for graduates who have a strong understanding and appreciation for numbers and data and choosing this particular major will give you the skills to analyse and manipulate data across a whole range of professional sectors. There is quite a demand for people to have these particular skill set, and this course would set students up very nicely for something in that particular area. The reason being is that regardless of what area that we’re living in or working in, whether it’s environmental, it’s business, it’s engineering, everything that we’re doing is generating data.
And we need to use data to drive the decisions that we make moving forward. So having somebody that understands data, how we can use it to inform our decisions is incredibly helpful to a whole range of different businesses. So that’s where our graduates would generally tend to move towards in this particular major. They might do it to help individuals, but they might also be working for government agencies to become an intelligence analyst or a big data analyst as well. It is quite a broad major, but if you do have any interest in data or data science, I would highly recommend that people consider this particular course. And again, you can see from where people end up, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Bureau of Meteorology, Deloitte, IDM, the stock market, there’s a whole range of different places that these graduates could end up. The chemistry major, so chemistry is all about trying to understand how and why chemical substances will work and react with each other in the chemistry that we offer. It’s really strong in two particular areas. There’s the synthetic chemistry side of things where we get students to make different chemicals or molecules, try and understand how we made them, how we might improve them, how we could apply them to different things in the areas of things like medicinal chemistry or coming up with new materials.
Having that synthetic chemistry knowledge is so important. And then there’s also the analytical aspects of understanding what, how much of something is in what we’re measuring. You know, a very simple example is trying to understand how much caffeine is in soft drinks. This has a really strong, strong role to play in areas like quality control. If we’re not, we need to be able to understand how much of something that we have in there so that we can maintain a certain quality. So the career options here, again, we might think that chemistry is just staying in the lab, but it again has applications across a much broader range of areas such as food science, medical science, the cosmetic industry, oils, mining, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, construction and environmental industry. So a lot of the places that I’ve named in some of those other sites, it is likely that there is also somebody with a chemistry degree also working at those places. But some other places like Chevron, BHP Billiton, Bluescope Steel, Boral Limited, Sydney Water, ANSTO or the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. Our physics stream, so we do have the applied physics major and the nanotechnology major in our physics stream, and these are really fundamental physics courses that will allow you to learn the theory and how you might apply physics to a whole range of different technologies, whether it be, you know, the more optics, light heat energy sectors as we move right down to the smaller nanotechnology coming up with nano devices for diagnosis of medical conditions all the way down to even smaller, where we get into quantum physics and quantum mechanics.
And throughout all of the courses, you’re going to be getting those hands on lab experiences, you might be developing automated electronics to do work for you, you might be building up, playing with lasers and building up nano photonic instrumentation, or you could be creating virtual environments using computational physics. In terms of career paths, again, there are a range of areas that people move into NASA, Energy Australia, Origin Energy, the Australian Defence Force, Microelectronics, or they might move into the nanotechnology area as well. So those are the individual majors for the Bachelor of Science. If you are wanting to learn a little bit more about the different courses and their structures, you can always head to our website there. What I’m going to do now, is I’m going to go through an example course structure just so that you can see what one looks like. And then when you go to the website, you can follow one along for yourself. So this is a course structure for the Bachelor of Science (Environmental Sciences), and this is what our first year looks like. So we’ve mapped it out for the autumn and spring session and the subjects that you would be taking.
So we have a look just at the names of the subjects there, we can see that there’s some chemistry in there, there’s some statistics, biology, some physics, as well as the environmental subjects as well. We always want to make sure that even though you are getting that discipline expertise, that you also get those foundational fundamental science skills as well. When we move into the second year, that’s where things start to become a lot more specialised and you can see that from the subjects that are on offer here. So in the autumn session, you’re looking at things like ecology, experimental design and sampling, geological process. And what’s also really good about this course is the number of electives and choice that you have. So you can choose any elective that you like in that autumn. And then in spring, you get to choose between more sort of specialised environmental electives. So microbial, microbial, that’s the one, ecology, environmental remediation, marine communities, animal behaviour and physiology. So you can start to see that we’re getting that sort of mix of traditional land environments, ocean experience, as well as the animal behaviour and physiology and plants physiology side of things as well. That third year, again, even more specialised, even more sort of a deep dive into the different types of areas that we have in environmental sciences.
And you can see here, here are some of our third years on different field trips that if you choose some of these subjects, you are likely to also be able to participate in. So each course will have something similar to what I presented here. Again, head to our website so you can have a look and see what, one of the courses that interest you might look like.
The last course that I’m going to talk about is our Bachelor of Advanced Science. So this is a course that is meant to challenge a lot of our students and it is there to really test and push the students to be the best possible scientists they could be. It’s a little bit different in terms of how that we do it. We want students in this course to be developing their skills in inquiry oriented approaches and having access to the researchers a little bit more than some of the other courses might. And we do that through a research immersion model. A key advantage of this course is that we, you are able to engage in a research project that is linked to your particular major of interest, the other degrees you may have the opportunity and where possible, students should 100 percent engage with those opportunities. But in these particular courses, it’s built into their, to their course. There are opportunities for these students to also do placements with research scientists so that they can learn on the job or in the lab right next to our academics or PhD students that are currently working on these real world problems. We are also, get a little bit more of an advantage for the students in that they are able to be mentored by different research teams, which can support them in learning their theory, but also helping them to solve real world problems. So there are two majors in this particular course, the first one is pre-medicine. And this introduces the practices and theories underlying medical research and health professions. It is seen as a pathway to study postgraduate medicine or dentistry. It’s a more direct pathway there. The areas that you’ll be studying in are human anatomy, physiology, pathophysiology and pharmacology, again giving you those fundamental medical science and medical skills that can help set you up for postgraduate study in medicine or dentistry. However, if the, you are still interested in this course, but you’re not interested in becoming a doctor, as we can see on the right hand side here, there are still plenty of other careers that this particular course could take you on. A microbiologist, a cancer researcher, pathologist, a medical and science technician, physiotherapist or someone who works in the sales and support of medical devices.
The next course or the next major for The Bachelor of Advanced Science is our pharmaceutical sciences course, and it is one where you will gain the knowledge and practical skills to learn about new drugs and drug therapies. This is seen as a pathway for students into postgraduate study who might be interested in pharmacy or potentially medicine as well. It will also develop your research skills and expertise to pursue a career as a research scientist in the area of pharmaceuticals. And it does have an entry pathway into the UTS pharmacy. So there is a more direct link for some of the students in this course to our Master’s program. So if you do complete the Master’s program, you can go and work in a pharmacy quite easily. However, if you just want to have this particular qualification, you can also get a career in just a regular pharmaceutical sciences area, health related careers or biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies as well. So there is quite a lot of options for people if they are wanting to consider this particular course.
So this concludes this particular video. I want to thank you for listening and being present. If you do have any questions, you can always get in touch with us via email at science@uts.edu.au. Or head to our website, science.uts.edu.au/future. If you do want to see some of the fun things that we get to do at UTS, please do head to our social @UTSScience on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Thank you for listening.