 Well, good morning, everybody. It's nice to see you all and thank you for coming along today. My name is Dr. Mira Savaratnam, and I am the undergraduate admissions tutor for the Politics Department. With me is Dr. Tolger St. Musnamiro, who is my colleague who is the BA Politics and joint degrees convener. And we've also been joined, I believe, by our head of department, Dr. Felix Berinskota. So I am going to just ask my colleagues to briefly introduce themselves and let's start with Tolger. Say a bit about yourself and your background and why you became an academic. Hello, everyone. Welcome to this virtual open day. We are very happy to have you with us today. My name is Tolger St. Musnamiro. I'm a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies. I did my PhD at New York University and I joined SOAS in 2019 and before coming to SOAS I worked at LSE. Most of my teaching in the department is about modules that focus on research methods and political minorities. My research is about mostly political conflict and especially about certain consequences of conflict and specifically forced migration. Most of my recent research is about the Syrian Civil War and the Syrian refugees. I work these topics by doing public opinion surveys both among Syrian refugees as well as amongst the host populations that are currently hosting Syrian refugees. Why did I become an academic? Well, my decision was very early on even when I was in high school. I was pretty sure that I'm going to become an academic because I simply wanted to. I was fascinated by the political world and I really wanted to spend most of my adult life, professional life on trying to understand policies in various different contexts. And especially how sort of political power works. I guess that's a very quick summary of my past and present as an academic. Thank you Tolger. That's fascinating. Felix. Good morning colleagues and prospective applicants. Can you see me? I don't know if there's a video. Yeah, great. So my name is Felix beyond because I'm the head of department of politics and international studies. I've been at source and in the department for 12 years. I'm originally from Germany but did my studies in the US and my PhD in London. I am an expert in international relations international politics broadly speaking but for the last two years I've been the head of department. Which basically means that I'm less involved in teaching although I do try to teach every year. Simply because it's the most fun part of the job. In many ways. All I want to say is that this this department is one that is that is special is particular in many ways and and the reason why I ended up here well there's number one because you know they offered an opening in in London and I lived in London at the time. It's also because it offers a perspective on the world that no other politics department offers to you the the expertise in Asia, Africa and the Middle East is unrivaled and you know moving from a non western or looking at global issues from a non western perspective is really is really what what what we excel in and I think that is that is really what what attracts me. to this place and which is why I'm really thrilled to you know to work with my colleagues and try to try to encourage you and convince you to apply to this to our programs. I don't want to say much more other than the diversity of our perspectives is mirrored by the diversity of our staff. They come from all kinds of backgrounds. They come from all over the world that they speak multiple languages. But so our students our student body is is you know is not one that I mean you would expect in London to have, you know, a plural multicultural environment in any case, but I think so as you know tops this even more. So the diversity of our students is what I think makes this most exciting and inspiring to both teach and to research. And yeah, so I hope you will be convinced at the end of this hour. Thanks. Thanks Felix, and I'll just add a bit more about myself so I'm also a specialist in international relations. I didn't actually think I was going to be an academic I thought I was going to be a music journalist for the majority of my undergraduate days. I missed studying actually when I finished and I liked thinking about politics and the more I learned about it and more fascinated I was also having family who are from Sri Lanka I was particularly interested in war and violence and conflict and peace building. And I ended up writing my PhD about peace building in Mozambique. And in fact many of the ways in which international aid wasn't that helpful in terms of solving the country's problems. So what I work on now is a combination of theories and concepts, particularly around coloniality and race. And I'm currently working on a new project about the impact of global debt in how we shape international politics. So this is a fascinating environment in which to work and study and I would echo what Felix said about the exciting nature of so as a community. Before we get into all of that let's take a step back and think about what it means to study politics. Many of you might have been looking at it at a level, but I thought I'd give you a flavor of maybe how we approach it at undergraduate level and also in a sort of academic setting. I mean what we're talking about is the organization of power in society. This is a massively important question obviously affects all of us from the wealthiest to the least wealthy from the most powerful to the least powerful, and everywhere in between. Now we look at this in several different ways. I think one of the ways in which we think about it is through what we might call formalized systems that is formal institutions of government, parliament selections, cabinets, the laws and treaties that are formalized as part of the political world. Everybody kind of understands that that is the stuff of politics. However, we also go beyond that to think about ideas, the world of ideas, the values, the norms that shape not only the way we contest politics but also the way we think about politics. The frames of reference or the identities or the locations in which you place people have an enormous impact on the distribution of political power in society. Finally, we also think about what I would call social structures and forces so these are the big things that impact our lives such as gender race capitalism. There are large impersonal structures that nonetheless reproduce themselves over time, and in ways which greatly impact the distribution of power. We can also think about grand processes such as the ecological destruction climate change, and the organization of the economy and corporate power. All of these different layers to the political world and how power is organized in society. What we do when we study politics is that we try to develop the methodologies and the tools and the concepts to help us study these systematically. Not just saying oh that looks a bit weird and that looks a bit weird, but actually looking at them comparatively trying to define what's going on trying to understand the mechanisms and the dynamics. And we hope this gives us better ways of asking questions about politics, and also ways of testing the answers. What we're really trying to do with a politics degree or an international relations degree is train your brain to see the workings of power in society and to see it in ways which are clear and analytical and focused and rigorous. Let's actually bring you into the conversation now and let's think about how we might approach some of these issues. So I would like some suggestions from yourselves, you can either unmute yourself and speak or put the answers in the chat. So in your view what are some of the big political issues of the present like what is it that gets you kind of motivated or makes you think or makes you cross or makes you try interested. Climate change from an India and got Charlie saying inequality that isn't really key issues. Let's think about climate change like what do we think about when we think about the politics of climate change. Obviously there is a huge issue that affects basically everybody on the globe, but as a political scientist you would say well it's affecting people very unequally right and so there are those with lots of power in terms of how things are organized in order to be able to change these things but these are not the same people who are being affected necessarily immediately by the impacts of climate change. So immediately we can see that the different locations of the power, the power holders and those who are affected is part of the problem here as part of the political order, and then we can loop in questions like ideology we can loop in questions like the structures of capitalism that help us make sense of how and why climate change kind of continues to be a problem. Tolga there's some other points in the chat did you want to pick one up. We won't be able to answer all of them necessarily. Sure absolutely. Let's follow in the list, inequality right so Charlene is mentioning inequality. That's certainly a topic that you would be interested in as political science scholars, and perhaps one advantage of looking at inequality as a political science rather than right as a scholar of economics right, we would actually try to understand inequality in its various facets, including right so the political factors behind the quality right we wouldn't suppose we are interested in causes of income inequality or wealth inequality right, while it's standard economists would try to explain this only with reference economic factors, right. As a political science scholar, you would have the opportunity to go a little deeper, right, you would know that many economic processes, including those who produce these inequalities these vast differences in income and wealth are not only right, explicable by reference to to to economics to market to market forces so to speak, but certainly to political actors as well like the state for instance right or or or sort of strong interest groups. So that would be one way you would actually approach the topic of inequality, specifically from a politics angle right, and then in addition to that as political science scholars right, we would have the sort of the opportunity right or the capacity right to look at various manifestations of inequality across different context and try to understand why inequality levels change why the nature of inequality is different across different countries, so on and so forth so that is some of the ways in which I believe via political scientists with approach a topic like inequality. Thank you. I can see Felix Felix did you want to come in on one of these otherwise I might tackle the Israel Palestine conflict. Yeah, I would have just picked this up but I can I can leave it to you but I would. What I would do is to say that conflict is of course one of the big themes that that we study, and whether it is a specific conflict such as that one. There is a broader question of why, why do wars happen why why over and over again, or how has the nature of war and violence changed. Where do we see the causes for these, you know, for for these conflicts and it isn't just about looking at one conflict in isolation you would also ask, you know, how is a particular conflict linked to broader dynamics in world politics for instance or to domestic politics. So if you take something like the Israeli Palestinian conflict you would also have to look, you know, look beyond that and think about, you know the historical conditions that created it you have to think about great power politics that are involved. You would have to go, you know beyond and you have to think about implications, you know let's take the region of the Middle East as a whole, over war, such as the one in Syria, you know the implications in terms of for instance, refugees and streams of migration, the shifting forces of power the involvement of other actors such as, you know Iran, Russia, the United States, and so forth so I think they're really important questions about conflicts that we tackle that are both about conflicts, a very particular conflict but also the broader context in which these occur both the international domestic and the historical dynamics. I mean yes and just to pick up and kind of illustrate what Felix was saying with regard to the Israel Palestine conflict. I mean one of the things that you would become aware of when reading the literature about the conflict is that there are at least three models for understanding what is going on in Israel and Palestine. And what is interesting about the scholarship is that it also is affected by the political struggle itself. So one model would be to see Israel Palestine as a security issue defined by terrorism and its effects on the Israeli state and to look at it in that particular framework. Another framework would see it as an ethnic conflict driven by identity driven by religion or belief or the sheer identification of people as being from different groups and backgrounds. And a third framework would look at it as a, as a colonial or anti colonial conflict about settlement about dispossession and about the kinds of violence and resistance that that entails. And I think something like the Israel Palestine conflict is that both what is happening on the ground and the explanations themselves become sites of contestation, because particular explanations you can see a lie themselves to particular political outcomes. And one of our jobs as scholars is to try and disentangle or distinguish the good arguments from the bad in order to understand with most precision and robustness what is actually going on. Thank you so much for your wonderful answers we don't have time to tackle more of them now unfortunately but these are exactly the kinds of things that we would be looking at in the degree and that you'd have the opportunity to explore. I think a couple of other questions just in case you were quiet but that would not necessarily have happened with the so as groups so we've already discussed climate change I'll leave that one there. I'll briefly talk about this one though because I think this is a key issue in politics at the moment how do social media and other surveillance technologies shape what it means to be a citizen. The notion of citizenship is of course central to politics it gives you a set of rights it gives you a set of obligations gives you an identity gives you privileges and so on. And it gives you a relationship to the other people who are part of your political order. Now the traditional view of citizenship or at least the liberal kind of view of citizenship is that citizens are rational individuals who come together, both for their personal good and also for the collective good. The notion of citizenship is about participating in a transparent political order that's what democracy is, and having one's voice heard. Now what social media does of course is totally change the way in which you experience the world, the way in which you understand what arguments are being put out there, the way in which algorithms shape what information you're presented with the way in which particular it becomes more prominent, particularly information which is kind of counter counter hegemonic or counter cultural. And that radically changes not just, let's say your rationality but it works at the level of your emotions right social media is actively working on your emotions all the time to make you engage with it. And what does that mean for how we understand our relationships to each other as citizens, and the way in which democracy works. There are lots of big questions to ask about this. And that's one of the key things that we would like to look at in study politics today. Tolga I think we have a question here. A last question for you to answer. Another question right that you might be interested in as students of politics, right. If you look at around the world right if you look around the world to countries that are large exporters of oil right for which oil is a very significant share of their exports. If you look at their sort of political regimes political systems right most of the time these countries are not necessarily the most democratic right so then that brings the question how actually does oil well shaped the likelihood of democracy in different countries to think about Saudi Arabia think about Russia think about in Israel I think about Nigeria. So then we as students of politics would want to answer this question and one way in which we can think about answering this question would be, well, what are the channels right through which oil wealth might perhaps influence right the kinds of political systems that that they wander. And then when we asked that question, we would start thinking about sort of different causal mechanisms that can link oil wealth to political regimes. We might for us to say well in countries with significant amount of natural resources and oil wealth right states are less likely or do need less to tax their citizens as a result of which they feel less obliged to listen to the views of their citizens, which leads to less chances of proper democratic representation, which then increases the chances of a authoritarian regime. Right, so that's one way we can think about this question as students of politics. Now in addition to that, we can also look at this relationship again across different context. We can look at this relationship in places like as I told you Saudi Arabia or Russia or Venezuela, but then there's also a Norway, right, where despite significant amount of oil wealth. Norway seems to have a pretty strong democratic regime so then we would start comparing, right, we will start looking for similarities and differences between these cases, and then perhaps you will say, Well, if the country is relatively underdeveloped or poor to begin with, then perhaps oil wealth is detrimental to democracy but otherwise it's perhaps not right. So this is just another way in which we as students and scholars of politics would approach the question of oil wealth, shaping regimes around the world and this is not going anywhere. Right, so despite predictions in the past that you know oil will become less important as a source of energy that doesn't seem to be the case. So, questions of these type, you'll certainly continue to keep us busy as students and scholars of politics. Thank you Tolga. Okay, well that brings us nicely onto the question of what do we do here at so as and how do we teach and study politics here in the department. I just wanted to give you a bit of background about our department. We're very highly ranked, which is a nice thing rankings on everything. But we've been recently ranked as the fifth best department in the UK and the seventh in Europe and the 21st in the world, which is a nice thing to hear and that's to do with our academic reputation, how well we teach and the value added we have for our students. We have award winning and impactful research as measured by the national research excellent framework, excellence framework, and our national students survey scores show that we have consistently excellent teaching and that's one of the nice things about being in this department. As Felix already mentioned, we have a very active and diverse body of staff and students I think we have amongst our sort of 30 something staff at least kind of 12 or 13 nationalities amongst our student body. I did account a couple of years ago about our undergraduate student body and I counted 60 nationalities so it's really a very exciting place to work and be. And I think uniquely we have a breadth and a depth of regional and subject specializations. We don't just have one person working on Africa we've got several people with different layers of expertise that really gives you that depth, which you wouldn't necessarily get elsewhere. So here's a quick look at our faces and this is us politics faculty, and you'll see that we're a very mixed group in terms of age and gender and ethnicity and background. And it makes it a really exciting and fun place to work and hopefully you'll get to study with lots of these exciting people in the future years. So let's move on to talking about our undergraduate degrees now and our undergraduate degrees are basically organized around four core elements. So these are first disciplines and concepts so even though we do things differently we still make sure that you get all of the bread and butter basic material that you need to study politics and international relations. And that to have been developed in these fields over time so you will get a good grounding in where the discipline is what are the key concepts what are the terms that you're going to encounter over and over again. Second, we are very strong on particularly the regions of Asia Africa and the Middle East, but we see them in a global context and a global perspective. We see them in their historic relations, not just with the former imperial powers but also with each other. And we also think about the wider world including the West, as it relates to different parts. So we have a strong regional emphasis again that is a very unique feature. The area in which we organize our degrees is around is around global issues so particularly in your third year you would get to study specific issues in depth. Those that you've already mentioned such as climate change such as security, also migration also technology, and so on. So we want to make sure that you have very different ways of cutting up the cake with disciplines and concepts with regions and with issues, so that you can really think about those and around them. And the final element which I think is in all of our modules is this idea that we need to study from multiple perspectives or standpoints. So that is to say we don't just say look this is knowledge and then you learn it, we say, Okay, this is knowledge from this perspective, but you also have this other way of thinking about this thing from this other perspective, and we need to look at how those things can see that interaction also as a political process. And that's one of the things that I think we emphasize and I think that's one of the things that makes our study of politics richer. In terms of overall in the UK obviously you'll be thinking about other universities, I would say what makes our programs very distinctive is that regional contact content and that multi, multi-perspectival content. And that focuses on thinking from below and I think that's one of the key things that has, you know, in a way constrained the study of politics historically it's always been from above it's always been from this kind of elite point of view, whereas many of the scholars not just in our department but across so I'm very committed to thinking about things from below. So you heard Tolga talking about his work like he's surveying refugees about what they think not just what other people think about refugees they understand their own situations. My work as well is about international aid has been and not just what the donors think about international aid but what the people who are receiving the aid think about international aid. Okay, so that takes you on to our specific degrees I'm going to run we're going to run through the programs a little bit now, and then we'll talk a little bit about how you might choose between them. So we've got a new program which I wanted to front load which is the BSE in politics philosophy and economics. And this is a collaboration between the departments of politics, religions and philosophy and economics at SOAS. And it is a very interdisciplinary degree and it gives you a grounding in these very different ways of thinking about the world, but which in some way speak to each other and common problems. So something like inequality, you have to understand it from a political angle in terms of rights and obligations and power, you need to understand it from an economic angle in terms of how income inequalities work and how economists think about them. You also need to think about it from a philosophical level. What are the philosophies that analyze or justify or reject inequality and how do they organize themselves. So you'd have the opportunity to think about let's say how Indian philosophies have justified caste inequalities, how that interacts with income inequality in India, and also the political inequalities between India and its neighbors or between India and the wider world. So that interdisciplinary approach really gives you an insight and you build that up as you go up over the three years. As I've mentioned, we emphasize the global nature of these problems and the need to understand both the Western and the non-Western approaches. What is key I think about this degree about all our degrees really is that we really make sure that you apply the knowledge so you do learn theory you do learn concepts, but you learn why they matter, right and how they act in the world. You learn why the use of different languages or different frameworks affects how we understand things. And overall this degree in particular has something which is very attractive to employers which is the ability to work in different modes, different analyses, different kind of ways of thinking, and that connects different analytical positions. So it's like training for the triathlon instead of just the marathon right you are learning lots of different skills you're becoming agile in lots of different ways, and that gives you a particular kind of package. Okay, I'm going to hand over to Tolga now to talk about our BA politics and joint degrees of which he's convener. Thank you, Mira. Why don't you run the whole slide perhaps so that all the three bullet points. So, yeah, our politics degree has certain unique features. And I'm not going to talk about particular modules that you take if you do a politics degree so sorry if you do a politics degree together with another degree, but I will rather tell you about what I believe are the unique features of our politics degree. So first, right as a broad sort of message to you, our politics degree does not only focus on sort of formalized systems of politics, as Mira put it right we do not just study governments we do not study just constitutions or electoral systems, but we do also study ideologies, norms, social structures. Anything basically that happens within the borders of countries, anything that happens as part of what we call domestic politics is the subject matter of our degree so as such, we will have the opportunity to study a very popular topic nowadays or a violent conflict that happens within countries such as civil wars, right, protest movements, right, so all these topics are very much part of our politics degree. Now, how do we do this right how do we study and teach you these these topics, right. So first thing that we do is that we cover both sort of mainstream but also critical approaches to politics. So what does that mean that means that in every topic that we cover we do not only read sort of classic text or sort of typical mainstream scholars that have worked on these topics but we also study the scholars who have a problematized right we have adopted a critical approach to the sort of mainstream classic text and scholarly works scholars who have problematized right so the relationship between these mainstream scholars and power hierarchies that are very much part of the political world for instance. In addition to that, right, the second unique feature of our degree is that you will have the opportunity to acquire a really deep knowledge in one of the regions that saw has been specializing for for for a very long time. Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and when I say that I do not only mean that my colleagues have deep knowledge of these areas that they will share with you. But in addition to that, my colleagues in the department do research themselves in these regions right so when they talk about different parts of Asia, Africa or the Middle East in their modules it's not just you know, conveying to you knowledge that others produce but actually conveying to you also knowledge that they themselves produce. And just to give you some examples right so I mentioned to you I for instance, specialized in parts of the Middle East, especially the question of Syrian civil war and Syrian refugees. Another colleague of mine Phil Clark has deep expertise on Rwanda for instance and especially post conflict justice proceeds procedures in Rwanda. In addition to sort of this opportunity to to to really learn about one or one region or more than one region around the world, you can do this together with studying a particular language. Right, you can either take modules to study a language of your choice or you can actually combine the politics degree with a degree in a language like Arabic Chinese Japanese or Korean. And then finally, as we emphasize we certainly also emphasize in this degree, multiple perspectives on these key issues of domestic politics around the world. So, you might be interested in migration you might be interested in environmental justice you might be interested in politics of the ongoing quality time that you might be interested in either specific cases of conflict like Israel telephone conflict or conflict around the world in general right so as we study these topics. We adopt multiple perspectives and what I mean by that is that we do not approach these topics only from the point of view of policymakers right the power holders, but also from the point of view of what I would call policy disruptors those who are to be subject to certain policy decisions but who themselves may actually respond on front challenge those policies, which would certainly give you the ability to to to and the skills to approach each of these topics from multiple angles, which I believe will be very helpful to you, whatever career choice you make, after you finish your your degree. Thank you so from my own mirror back to you. Thank you. And I'll just run quickly through the international relations and joint degrees. So again, I mean, I think you've probably got the message by now that the how we study international relations is also from beyond the traditional perspective. International relations as a field to some extent is even more has historically been even more Western than a lot of other fields because it's been about how to manage power relations and how to manage global order. We cover those mainstream ideas and debates within the program, but then we go beyond it we even from our first year start to think about how to challenge that and how to get away from this smaller view of what the world is into this bigger one into this more global or worldly approach. So at the beginning we're very interested in thinking about how where you stand shapes your perspectives. How does international relations look from Beijing or Tehran or Johannesburg. How do we think about world order when understood from those locations elite or non elite right from the masses. One of the things that our international relations degree does those emphasize the interconnected nature of world order so we're not just kind of in little countries, all separate, but for various structural and historical reasons we are in meshed we are entangled, and we want to give you a sense of how that affects how world order works. Okay, so just to move quickly then on to choosing a program. Some of you might be thinking about which of these programs is most interesting to you. I would say, by and large, people are pretty happy with the choices that they make, even though all of the choices are in some sense attractive. As mentioned, the politics and joint politics degrees are mostly emphasizing politics within borders so what we would understand as domestic politics that gives you a bit more depth into sort of the nature of political systems or comparative analyses. And it also gives you scope to study political theory and a bit more depth with international relations we're looking more at politics across borders, thinking about forms of global inequality war violence. There are many kinds of issues that we can see as kind of grand, largely transnational phenomena but of course we see how they connect and a very popular combination is of course politics and international relations together where you get a fair degree of both. Now these two traditions politics and international relations, as I said can be combined with each other, or with any of these other combinations listed on the slide. And as I mentioned in those other areas we'd also encourage you to go to the open days for those departments as well. And finally the politics philosophy and economics which is actually my undergraduate degree as well gives you that multidisciplinary approach to studying societies. So you might do disciplines in less depth but you'll have lots more perspectives from which to understand the world. Coming towards the last bit in a little bit I'm going to talk about what you can do after your degrees. But before that I just wanted to give you a sense of our students who have been through the programs what they ended up doing for their final dissertation so I've listed some titles here from this year's lot of dissertations. Some of these were my students, I supervised the dissertation about land dispossession in South Africa, and students gone on to be able to place your masters at St Andrews. The student who worked on AI powered surveillance has gone off to do a masters in data science in Carnegie Mellon University. I've got a student who wrote the view to the sea dissertation about the UK's response to the rise of China, who's now working in the Scottish Parliament thinking about health care and social care policy so you've got lots and lots of students here who are doing fascinating projects who are going on to do fascinating things who have really developed from you know where you are standing right now maybe at the end of your school time to becoming very advanced critical thinkers and able to do a range of a range of things. Tolga did you want to add anything about the final projects before we go into the discussion about life after uni. Just very briefly, I would say that this is really a fantastic opportunity for our students to work on a project of their own from beginning to the end. You start with a topic that you're interested in, you do some original research on the topic, and you work on it and then and then you finish it. So it will give you an opportunity to work on a topic in a slightly longer format than you would usually do in your assessment writing essay. And as such, based on my experience of teaching it from last year, our students have tremendously benefited from it. And some of which have even considered to use this project perhaps to try to publish it somewhere. So I think it's really a great opportunity for our students. Yeah, absolutely. And of course you'd be supervised by a member of staff who would give you support through that process. The last little section before the Q&A is going to be is going to be on what you can do afterwards, which many of you will be interested in. So, as with a lot of university degrees, we also emphasize the transferable skills that you can develop through our programs. As I mentioned, it's kind of like training for your brain to get you very smart, very analytical. And of course, the key skill, one of the key skills that you'll be developing from first year onwards is the ability to digest, organize and evaluate complex content, right? This is a key thing that employers need across a wide range of situations, whether you're analyzing stock markets doing financial things or you're working for the government. She's a diplomat, a British diplomat when we're talking about what her job is. She said she basically just has to digest and analyze and organize content and present it to political figures so that they can make decisions. So this is a really critical skill and it's one that you'd get through our programs. You'd have experience with qualitative and quantitative methods for handling data. We've got modules that would train you on that and you can take additional modules if that's of interest to you. With all of this, you would be encouraged to develop clear and professional presentation of your content, both in writing and orally. So there'll be of course the opportunity to get feedback on essays and other forms of written content, but also to deliver presentations orally, which is an absolutely key skill, both in person, I suppose, increasingly online. With our marking rubrics and with the way we assess you, we encourage you very much to think creatively and laterally and it's often that creative and lateral thinking that would get you the most marks, not just being able to repeat what the information has said, but to be able to put it together in an original way, or to be able to challenge it, or to be able to connect things which are not necessarily obvious. Of course with something, especially something like the final year project, you'd be learning a lot about managing yourself, managing the project and managing your time. University is not like school, things are not given to you in terms of every hour of your day being accounted for. You have to organize yourself, you have to put together your weekly schedule, you have to put together in a way how you deliver your project. We will support you with that, but part of what we're encouraging you to do is to become an independent kind of adult in that respect. Working in groups and with a lot of the extracurricular work that you will do will encourage teamwork and leadership. Students societies are great for this. We have a politics society in the department that students have really used to develop themselves and to develop themselves as a group. And finally, I think this is so important, particularly in the contemporary world. We will encourage you and you will develop cultural and what we call political competence, how to talk to people with sensitivity, respect and intelligence, who are from very different backgrounds, who have very different beliefs to you, what kinds of things they will find useful, how to respectfully disagree, how to think about how to frame what you're saying to make it intelligible to others. This is a key thing, particularly if you want to work in an international context, particularly if you're meeting different kinds of people all the time, how do you carry yourself, how do you talk to people, how do you respectfully engage with and respond to them. To give you a flavor of some of the recent roles that our graduates have gone into, I've just listed a few here. You can see that there's a wide range of jobs that people go on to. Of course, many people also go on to further study and master's programs. As I said, some have gone on to this year on to the States and to St Andrews had students go to Cambridge and Oxford and LSE and so on. And people either deepening their knowledge of politics or developing in a more applied field. But these are some of the jobs that students have gone into and hopefully you'll get to see more of our alumni over time. We also have a careers service, which gives really great personalized support, so it'll help you find vacancies, it'll help you find internships, and it'll help set up meetings with employers and alumni so you can hear more about what they're looking for. Then there's also the individual support in terms of careers advice, aptitude testing, CV building and interview and assessment center practice. So by the time you're ready to hit the job market, you're really well supported with a wide range of skills and all of this tailored support in terms of your employability. Okay, so that is the end of our presentation in terms of what we had to say to you. And we've got time now for question and answer, and you can either pop these in the chat or you can put your hand up and or unmute yourselves. I'm going to take the questions that have already been put into the chat to give people a chance to get their thoughts together. And so we've got a question asking other politics and international relations degrees itself, more research oriented. I mean I would say they are research oriented and lots of particular final year modules give you the opportunity to define the research question yourself right this is a key skill in terms of research oriented learning. So you can define your own question choose your own question, and then choose how you are going to go about answering it and that is the key to research. For those that prefer to have different kinds of assessment there are also modules with very different kinds of assessment so one third year module might be assessed with a long essay that you put together the rubric for yourself. So another third year module that I've been teaching on recently has assessment through detailed engagement with the reading so you don't have to write a lot. But it's based on your weekly reading and like writing questions which respond to that so they're very short answers, but the skill that we're testing there is your analytics skills have you understood what's being taught, what you, what the question is, and can you respond to it in a critical kind of way. So there's lots of different ways in which we would cultivate your skills in the degree. And as me asks, she's from Spain but for the last two years she's been studying in England her a levels does she still have to answer an English language test that I do not know I don't think so but that is something you would have to check with our undergraduate admissions team. So I'm going to ask our colleague, I'm only to put the email address in the chat, but you will be able to get an answer from them. What do we look for for a personal statement in IR this is a good question, and you don't take politics at a level with respect to your application from Masami. Personal statements are really interesting. I think people have tried to pack them with as much kind of extracurricular stuff as possible. I think from my point of view as an admissions tutor who reads personal statements, I just want to see that you're interested in the subject and that you've thought about it. So, tell me about a book that you've read or tell me about an issue that you're interested in or tell me about an experience that you've been involved with. And show me that you are interested in thinking about that in a more serious way. So for IR, I mean tell me about an issue that you're interested in a book that you've read or thought about it or maybe even a film or a documentary. Talk to me about why you want to do this subject what we really want to see in the personal statement is passion and also some way of showing us your analytic or intellectual engagement with the area. So this curricular stuff is fine, it's great. We encourage people to do it because it makes you more rounded it gives you more skills, and that will always benefit you. You don't take politics at a level does this affect your application. No, not really. We do like people to have got related subjects so history is great English is great geography is great sociology or psychology, other kinds of social sciences subjects are all fine. If you are taking predominantly science a levels we get a few applicants like this every year. Really make sure your personal statement explains why you're kind of switching course and explains and shows us a bit your engagement with ways of thinking analytically about these issues. So I'm just doing mainly languages for a levels and that's also that's also fine I mean with languages you're doing a lot of textual work as well, but again emphasizing the personal statement how and why you're interested in in this area. What kinds of extracurricular activities are offered in the degrees. I would say the majority of extracurricular activities that students in terms of student societies are offered via the students union so there's hundreds of student societies on every interest you could possibly think about from sports groups to political groups to cultural groups music dance hobbies all kinds of things within the politics department itself. I would say that we have the politics society which is a student group of which has been closely allied to the department, and that puts on politics related talks maybe career talks maybe networking events. The department of course also puts on social activities, but some regular seminars and events that everybody's welcome to attend. We focus more on the academic side of things and somewhat the social side of things at the level of the department, and then beyond that students union and other kinds of societies around so as would do that. So I'd encourage you to go to the students union page, which is I think so as union.org to have a look at that. If you're retaking a levels that will not affect your application we know that a lot of people, particularly over the last couple of years for circumstances or almost completely outside everyone's control have not ended up with the a level grades that they either wanted or deserved and so we understand that a lot of people will be doing retakes we will not look. I would applaud the students for wanting to to improve their grades in that way. What are the entry requirements to study at so as so they differ from program to program for our programs the standard offer would be a AB. We do, and we are able to take different contextual circumstances into account. So if you think you might qualify, because maybe you're first in the family to go to university, you've been on free school meals, you know, not many people from your neighborhood go to uni, then do inquire because we do try to adjust our office to take unequal circumstances in the world into account. So I think that applications from an IB student has done a couple of high levels in different settings. Yeah, so I mean, the point of the admissions process is to check that you're interested in the subject and that you can do it. If you showed that ability across different settings rather than all at the same time, that's, that's fine we're just interested to know that you can actually do the work, because it's unfair for us to take you in, if you are going to be right for you. And, you know, you should also think about, if you are trying to get into a uni where the entry or grades are far above what you're actually achieving, is that going to be a good experience for you overall. So I would say, you know, think about that match but of course if we think you can do it if there's evidence in your academic record that you can achieve at the level that we need you to, then we will take that very seriously. Do I have any recommended readings to read for starting the IR course? Well, there's a lot. I would, I'm going to type a couple of things into the chat. There's a website called eir.info, which is pretty interesting because it's a student run collective that does lots and lots of coverage of international relations as a subject. They have interviews, talks, podcasts, essays, all kinds of things on there. And you can really look around at what you're interested in. I think that's pretty good. And if you're looking for a book, there are some basic texts, sort of slight, I mean, there's Cynthia Weber's introduction to international relations, which you can look up online. Otherwise, I would say reading the essays on eir.info will give you a really good feel for the subject. Great. Tolga, did you want to add anything? And of course, feel free to ask questions. We'll be ending in a couple of minutes. Maybe just one sort of general and perhaps maybe easy advice in terms of what we look for in person statements and Mira knows better than me. But, you know, Mira, how many applications do you read? I have read lots and lots and lots. Yeah. And people go through applications quickly. So, you know, so as you write your statements, think about this. Think about the fact that Mira is going to read a lot of them. So you should try to, you know, write something that would sort of in some way speak out and speak out not in some sort of bizarre way, but you know, you should really try to make sure that you do convey your passion for some right kind of politics or political phenomenon that you're really interested in that and you really want to study this topic in a disciplined way and you want to spend your undergraduate years working on that. So I think that type of sort of approach would help you in writing your statements in the right way. That's my advice. There's a question in the chat. Do any alumni go into media? So, yes, definitely. We've had quite a few journalists come out of the program. I'm trying to think. So one of the ones that I knew recently went into work for the BBC Africa team and he kind of greatly benefited from his OS training in terms of the Africa Specialism. What are the seminar sizes? So, most of our undergraduate modules are taught with a large lecture for the whole group and then a seminar of up to 15 students. That is the general format. So you'll have both large group kind of sessions and small group ones. And then of course you've got one to one office hours and so on with your tutors. Some of our seminars are taught as a two hour block, we'd say 20, 25 students in them. And those are more the advanced sessions. So you've got more interactive time, more engagement with the lecture, different kinds of group work. So partly the seminar size depends on the format but for the majority of the time it's up to 15. Yeah. Any other final questions before we have to draw things to a close? Yeah. Let's stop sharing the screen now. And if you've got any final questions, I suppose, please do drop us a line either to study at so as dot ac dot UK, or if you want to, if you want to do the politics department. So if you can go to UG politics at so as to, sorry, UG politics admissions at so as to AC dot UK. I'm just putting that in the chat. And that will come to me and I will be able to answer your questions. Okay, I'm going to close it there and hand it over back to Armani. Thanks so much for joining and thank you to Mira Tolga and Felix for all the information they've given today. Again, like she said, if you have any sort of general admissions questions, feel free to contact study at so as to AC dot UK. And then mirrors also put the politics departments email in there. So yeah, thank you for joining today. Thank you. Hope to see some of you next year. Thank you. Bye.