Geographically, Oxford is fairly centrally located in the UK, being about an hour from London (there are frequent coach, and rail services).  Apart from the local airport in Oxford, our nearest international airport is Heathrow (about 50 minutes away).  Situated within a ten minute bicycle ride of the centre of Oxford, Oxford Brookes University aims to be one of the best universities in the UK.  Separate from Oxford University, (although we do have some joint units and courses), we offer a different perspective on living and studying in Oxford, the “new” in the “old”, this makes us a very interesting place to be a student.  We are a medium sized UK university with about 16,000 students, and have been teaching students in one form or another for about 150 years.  We have traditionally had both a strong UK and overseas student body, and this has grown over recent years – last year we had students from over 100 countries, and these made up about 10% of our students. 

The University is organised into eight academic  schools, and offer undergraduate and postgraduate degrees across a wide subject range.  The School of Life Sciences (formerly the School of Biological & Molecular Sciences) teaches and researches across the range of the Biological - Human Bioscience - Environment areas at both undergraduate and masters level. The school has about 40 academics with about a 100 staff in total. The undergraduate school is 600-800 strong, with about 50 masters students and approximately a further 50 PhD students at any one time.  We are the largest research community within the University, and are usually described as a friendly and welcoming place to work.  Many of the staff are international figures in their fields, with extensive collaborations within and beyond the UK, this is clearly advantageous both whilst studying here, and subsequently after graduation.

At the undergraduate level we offer single and combined honours courses across about 20 subjects – most of those above can be studied in a single honours or combined honours format (i.e. with any of the other ~70 subjects that the University offers) - see our website for full details.  Most of our undergraduate students have the opportunity to study for a semester at a non-UK university and count those courses to their degree programmes.  Last year we had students at American, Australian, European and Asian Universities doing just that..  In some of our undergraduate programmes there is also the opportunity to take a work or industrial placement as part of the degree.

At postgraduate level we offer a range of taught-research masters programmes in the areas of environmental management, assessment and technology, conservation ecology, as well as in applied nutrition, biotechnology and bio-imaging. Again, see our website for details.

Upon graduation, rates of employment for our students are very high – with about ⅔ of our graduates in career posts within 6 months of graduation, and a further ¼ registered for further or higher degrees.  This is consistent with the overall Brookes picture “..the University [Brookes} is very popular with employers and is always close to the top of the graduate employment league tables…” (Virgin 2003 Alternative Guide to British Universities) The additional advantage of Oxford for new graduates is the existence of the various biotechnology, environmental and medical clusters in the area.  Each year numbers of students graduate from our biology degrees and go on to graduate medical schools to continue their training. 

There are opportunities to visit the School at regular intervals, if you wish to do this, or need further course details, please visit our website or contact us.

Mrs Helen Cross
bms1@brookes.ac.uk
+44 (0)1865 483600 (phone)
+44 (0) 1865 483242 (fax)
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/bms/home.html