Duration: 03:28mins
Transcript
I am Roger Watson, I'm the Programme Lead for MRes Cancer Sciences at the University of Birmingham.
This programme is a real opportunity to gain active research experience in a cancer research laboratory, so it's a thirty week research programme and this gives you a real opportunity to gain experience, contribute to research in a laboratory and hopefully to actually extend our knowledge of cancer research.
The programme is aimed mostly at biology and biomedical science students, although we do take some medical students as well. The normal entry requirement is a 2:1 degree, though we do also look at other students who haven't quite achieved that.
The programme consists of two components. There's a taught component which counts for 60 credits but the major focus is the research project which counts for 120 credits. The taught components, the taught modules, there are three of them, are assessed by essays and/or short exams. But the research project, which is the major part of the programme, is written up as a thesis and that is examined in the same way as for a PhD.
The student spends a long time in the laboratory gaining real research experience, then this really helps raise their profile when applying for PhD studentships or research positions in laboratories in industry or academia or the NHS. Well it really trains them to do research, it trains them to contribute to research in a laboratory and, you know, this experience really helps them in their future career.
The student should choose this course because we offer a real research experience with the 30 week research projects and we have over 30 active research groups in the School of Cancer Sciences at Birmingham. These are internationally recognised and the experience you gain will stand you in really good stead when applying for future positions.
We are a well funded university. The research groups are very well funded. We have excellent facilities and we have a human tissue bank here, we have all sorts of major pieces of equipment like NMR equipment, but also I think importantly we have very very close links with the hospitals and clinicians at Birmingham.
What we're really looking for in an applicant is someone who wants to do research and that is the most important thing. So you have to have an appetite for doing research. We aim to take about fifteen students on the course. We don't want to make it too big because we want to give each of those students a proper research experience.
I think my favourite thing about teaching the course is really to give those students research experience and they actually come out of it thinking this has been a great experience, we know how to do research now and we can really look forward to the future.
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