Kathleen Armour - Employability & Applicants

One of the things I often say to students on open day is, we must work in one of the most exciting areas possible at the moment because it's highly topical.

Everyone's interested, Whether it be in education, in policy, in health, related to medicine, you name it. People are interested in physical activity. The organization of sport is part of that. People quite often want to engage in physical activity in a form of sport. So the links to sport are important, but so are the links to medicine, so are the links to psychology, all of these things are connected.

When it comes to employment our students can go into any of those fields literally.We do get students who go into policy type positions and physical activity stroke health policy is a major growing area. We can get students who go obviously into teaching, education, coaching, further research and there are lots of opportunities in research in our field at this moment.

I think you can take this work into a number of areas, and apart from that, the skills that you can gain through our program, which are quite wide compared to some programs. They offer you a broad employ-ability base as well, which makes you a very attractive to an employer.

We look for students who are really excited by our area. I think particularly at masters degree level, because people really have either made that choice or they want to further their knowledge in it, if they're all ready in employment, or they really see where they want their employment to go. So these are focused students. We think with these programs we can really help people get a leg up into the area that they want to go into.

When we're looking at applicants we look for a number of different things depending on the program they're applying to and their current status. So if you're just coming off the end of an undergraduate degree and you're hoping to go straight onto a master's degree we would look for a good 2.1. We want you to be pretty independent, creative problem solving and basically passionate about our subject, with enough background to enable you to take advantage of what we have to offer.

If however you're already in employment and you're looking for part time program. perhaps you're returning to study, you haven't studied for years, then we probably would look for slightly different things. So we're always looking for a 2.1 degree as a basis but sometimes people come to us with other forms of qualification, a lot of experience and in the vocation related courses it would make sense to take those into account. So with those kinds of programs we pretty much look at the individuals and we have a good history of helping those people to get up to speed with academic study.