Teaching and learning

You will learn through a combination of lectures, laboratory sessions and tutorial classes. Your total contact or teaching time will be around 19 hours per week in your first year. You will be expected to spend time on independent study and coursework or lab reports. Overall, this means that you should be spending 30-40 hours on your studies each week.

Modular structure

Your degree will be taught in modules, each covering a different topic. Typically, modules will be taught through a number of hours each of lectures and problems classes/ tutorials. Practical laboratory modules, such as ‘Scientific Measurement’, have fewer lectures and are almost entirely delivered in the teaching laboratory. Assessment

Modules are assessed depending on the nature of the work being carried out. For example, if the module involves practical work only, the assessment will be based on laboratory reports alone. For nonpractical modules, you will have various combinations of assessment including weekly coursework, termly assignments, and end-of-semester examinations.

Independent study

At university, you will be expected to undertake a large amount of independent study. Your individual study time could be spent preparing for tutorials and lectures, reading, assessing data from experiments, completing lab reports and revising for exams.

Sam Matthews, Physics MSci 2017

Carrying out independent work will develop your skills in valuable areas like time management, critical thinking and the ability to problem solve.

Research projects

For many students, the most exciting part of their degree is their final year research project. This project will be chosen from a large range of high-level, open-ended research topics that are developed by our academic staff so as to be closely aligned with their own research interests. Your research project is therefore a chance to develop your interests in your chosen topic of physics, supervised by an academic member of staff who is an expert in that area. My project involved studying Saturn’s F Ring, one of the most active rings in the Solar System, using images taken by the Cassini space probe. I very much enjoyed discussing my findings with my supervisor, Professor Carl Murray. I also had the opportunity to exhibit my work at the Houses of Parliament and at the British Conference of Undergraduate Research (BCUR).

The project is also a fantastic way of improving the research skills, time management, writing ability and independent problem solving that will prepare you for a graduate career or further study.