Fragkiskos Filippaios - Contact Times, Staff and Facilities

The business school was built in 1992. It looks like, actually, a corporate headquarter. There are executive lecture theaters. There is one big lecture theater with about 200 seats. There is a much smaller one, which we use currently for the MBA. It's called the symposium room, and it's a room that allows interaction between the students and the lecturer.

Then there is a series of different sizes of seminar rooms. We have a relatively small IT facility with computers, because at the moment the university has the Templeman library, which is one fantastic building that offers computing facilities, meeting rooms, and everything like that for the students.

All our post graduate courses usually take place within the business school, and we've overgrown that particular building at the moment. So, we're now planning to build a new one, which should be ready by 2016, and that's a big advancement for the school.

Usually, what happens at traditional master's in the business school has about three to four contact hours per module, per week. So, that's usually up to eight to nine hours. There is a mixture between lectures and seminars. So, there is one hour per week for each module on lecture, two hours in seminars, depending on how the module is actually delivered.

Then, of course, once they finished with the part of the program, which is from September to, actually, April. They move on to the dissertations states, and then they will have weekly meetings with a potential supervisor, in order to finish a business report or dissertation, if it's an academically oriented piece of work. So, usually during the summer periods, what they would expect is about one to two hours of personal contact time with one of the lecturers in the business group.

The staff at the business school is quite diverse. We have more than 60 members of staff coming from 20 different nationalities, covering a wide range of different disciplines. From the traditional business disciplines, like marketing, human resource management, to operational research, and we even have now people who have expertise in career development, personal development. There are people who have been hired over the last couple of years who are there to help our students develop those employability skills.

The business school, actually the business school building, is designed in such a way that creates a community, and this is quite important for us. Students feel, when they walk in to that building, that they belong to the Kent Business School community, and they can approach lecturers, they can talk with the lecturers.

You could see them walking in the foyer of the business school having coffee a lot of the time with the lecturers, and discussing different things. There's a very wide range of male, female lecturers in the business school, and also, as I said, different nationalities, different languages, different cultural backgrounds, different experiences, different levels.