 Great, so welcome everyone to our graduate open event where today we're going to be talking about the MSc Physics and Engineering in Medicine by Distance Learning. Last week, we ran a department event where we talked about the postgraduate programs in medical physics and biomedical engineering at UCL. But we've got a separate session today really because distance learning is quite different in terms of structure of how to study and so we generally like to give a bit more context as to exactly how that works so if you are applying for the course you know exactly what to expect. So we've got a couple of things today to talk about and we'll hopefully have a chat with a couple of students as well so you can get some experiences before giving you a chance to ask questions to myself and to our current students as well if you like so yeah welcome my name is Billy Dennis so I am the postgraduate taught programs program director in the department but my particular specialty in the department is with distance learning and I'm in charge of the distance learning MSc program which is why I'm here talking about this today. So I'll quickly mention a couple of things about what what motivates our course and why you might be interested in coming and studying with us at UCL more generally. UCL's real strength it's in the university league tables and is very highly regarded it's got extremely high research quality and most of our department's research comes under the banner of world-leading or internationally excellent in the last research excellence framework we've got so you'll have an opportunity to join in that not just learning from the modules we teach but also joining the research groups and taking part in some of that world-leading research as well. We are a relatively small department compared to some others at UCL in terms of postgraduate students so that means that we have more personal relationships with our students than some other courses do personal tuition and through supervision you get a lot more direct contact and that means you get the benefit of that and hopefully we get the benefit of you from that as well we hope that you'll be key contributors to the department through the work you do with us as well and the other thing in medical physics and biomedical engineering we have a cross subject department so we cover many different areas and our particular specialty really is applying engineering and physics to our links with clinicians in hospitals and being in central London we've got access to many world famous hospitals UCLH is right next door but also Great Mormon Street Children's Hospital the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital there's a range of these that are right nearby many of our researchers have collaborations with these groups and you'll get to benefit from that as a student as well. So some key academic staff this is me on the left there some other people that you'll come across either teaching you through lecturing or potential to join them in their research groups you probably will come across these guys a little bit less today we're not having any of these guys apart from me that was last week but if you want to see our postgraduate team then these are this is our team right here so nice to meet you all on that side. So department's research I talked a bit about this last week as well but it's important to notice that you as a distance learning student we don't want you to be passive you will study probably from your own homes or from your own countries and in which case you won't be here to be able to go and speak to academics in their inner offices directly but we hope that you'll be joining some of these research groups as part of your of your work on the Masters and so we've got a wide range of research special season department medical imaging forms a major part of our of our department's research of various methods ultrasound magnetic resonance imaging biomedical optics but also the analysis of the images that relate often to cancer therapy and things like that so our radiation physics group is a key part of of our department of which this radiation this msc really the distance learning one is focused on radiation physics and imaging so this teaches you about advanced x-ray imaging and we've got groups that look at detectors as well as cancer therapy in particular proton and radiotherapy which is a major specialty next door at ucl h used to be a ucl hospital and so yeah that's a major part of our group so if you want to learn more about the research being done in the department I'd recommend having a look at our websites we've also got quite a public profile through our twitter or x accounts where you can keep up to what's the latest in terms of what's being done many of our groups do a lot of public engagement to sort of explain to a non-expert even what we're up to and so recommend you have a look at some of those when you get the opportunity roughly in the numbers of people in our department we've got around 50 permanent academic staff around 80 postdoctoral research staff so these are sort of slightly more junior researchers but still a lot of experience and then on the student profile side we're a department of about 200 undergraduates and roughly 100 110 postgraduate taught students in total including all all the various programs including the distance learning and then about 180 phd students so again the aim is that you to be a member of the community here in the department and join them and as I say relatively the staff the student ratio you can see is quite high so you get an opportunity to spend a lot of time with our staff we hope I'll say a little bit about the history of the msc program and in particular the distance learning msc it is a replication of the on-campus msc that's been running here at ucl and via the University of London for many years it was first set up in 1958 by Sir Joseph Rockblatt at the University of London when it was based at St Bart's so this was at the time the world's first master's degree in radiation physics applied to medical purposes that had been running for many years very successfully and then it merged into ucl in the late 80s and 90s and then in 2011 was when we established our distance learning routes the idea being to replicate the masters that was running on campus partly at the time to give opportunity for students who might be working in hospitals who could only study part-time to study but also to make it available to international students who might find it difficult to attend London in person as well either due to financial difficulties of being able to travel and live in London but also due to that working part so the aim of the msc by distance learning is to provide flexibility for whatever is needed for you as a student either because you need it in terms of time available for you to study so you can study the msc over multiple years or whether you need it for location purposes and our first graduates were in 2013 so you can see that they weren't studying full-time originally it was more part-time students and today we've got a mix of both of those in 2015 the program was accredited by the UK's national body in our subject which is the Institute of Physics and Engineering and Medicine so we're currently the only distance learning course to be accredited in this in this area and that accreditation is a mark of both our teaching quality and the assessments that we do but also it marks that it can be part can form a part of the clinical scientists registration that you require here in the UK if you want to work in a hospital as a medical physicist or any of other specialties under that banner so this forms part of the training the master's level training so you can use it on many of our students do on distance learning to to get their route to as it's known as clinical scientists registration which is where you gain your own masters and then you you work in hospitals and gain the competences you need there before before applying for your registration as a clinical scientist and we've had you know decent success and an excellent feedback from our students over the years and had some personal tutoring award nominations in the past as well so just to crave a quick summary of what we might see for the degree it is last week we talked about the different specialties in the department this particular degree the distance learning one is available for the radiation physics IPEM accredited stream and we've got students that can study that degree over three different time scales these are terminology this is terminology that UCL uses to describe you and when you apply for the course you'll need to pick one of these three methods full time means you complete the degree over one year so starting in September you'd finish in August in 2025 if you apply by part time that in UCL terminology means specifically for a master's you study over two years so you study half the msc in your first year and half the msc in your second year so you would finish then by august 2026 and then there is a third mode which is called flexible mode which is probably most common and gives just much opportunity for you to decide year by year how much you would like to study so most students on that flexible study don't take the maximum five years to complete the msc they'll often take fewer than that but it gives gives the option if you to take longer than two years to complete the msc so for some students that's that's valuable so um so that's the three options when you're applying for the program um the rationale for you studying is that you you can study completely alone there's no need for you to work with any other students for most of the degree or you can work in groups ideally when you join the course you'll have a cohort of other distance learning students that you would interact with many of our students if you are studying part time will have jobs already so uh that's quite helpful sometimes to get a bit of extra perspective and work together studying for exams and assessments etc um but as a distance learning student you don't have to be in person so you can of course study however you like you also have an opportunity that even though you're marked as a distance learning student some of our students like to take the opportunity to come to ucl's campus and join in some of the activities that happen in campus be it a lecture be it a lab be it an opportunity to visit the research team or the clinical teams in the hospitals um this isn't compulsory at all but uh you know this is an option for students just because you're distance learning doesn't mean you're not welcome on campus you can indeed come and uh and join in on campus if you'd like you're you're considered a student by any other metric um that that are on campus students are and so this is not just for UK students although some of our UK students do visit campus more regularly we've got a student um who's from Hong Kong who's visiting uh later this month so it it sort of depends it's up to you that's an opportunity for you as you study with us so typical profiles of students that we might see who study on on these programs uh this is just really uh some different backgrounds we have we have students with physics degree undergraduate degrees we've got students with sort of engineering based undergraduate degrees mechanical engineering biomedical engineering and we've got computer scientists specialists there's there's a wide range in there as well so um you could you could come from any of these kind of backgrounds maybe your desires for for completing the program would be that you'd end up as a a full-time job in a as a clinical scientist um in which case um it's a good program for you and you might consider studying over two years for the msc to to allow you to do that um some of our students who apply are already working in hospitals and the hospitals sometimes might sponsor them by giving them one day to study per week um a typical way for them to complete degrees over two years using that one day uh off work a week to study their degree um then you know we might also have students who are they say from the different engineering specialties or perhaps a just general physics background but are looking to specialize into our subject area having not been there before um this is this might be a another background for you as well and if you need a bit more time to study if your available study time per week is not quite enough to complete the degree over two years then you might decide to complete over three years in which case you'd probably want to apply for the flexible route um and something that's becoming more and more common in recent years is uh for students to join study the degree with us as a full-time student um so that's open to you as well if you want to do that then then it really means full time you will you won't be able to work a full-time job at the same time as studying on the degree you'll end up running out of time but there's plenty of students who who follow this route and we've actually got one of them with us today who should be able to answer some of the questions about that if you'd like to as well so these are the three main study options for you in joining the distance learning course um really again the ethos of the program is flexible and we try to make it throughout as flexible to suit individual students to make it adaptable for your personal situation and again do you have the study time available are you are only available at certain times of the week all of that is ideally taken into account by how we teach on this course the general cycle for a distance learning year follows this sort of conical yearly cycle where you'll study if you're multiple if you're a multiple-year student you'll uh register for modules at the start of the year and you'll need to commit to those modules and then you study them over the two terms before doing assessments uh usually exams at the end of the year in may or so and then you re-enroll the following year and you complete all the modules until eventually you've completed the course um generally for students who on the five-year program uh they're generally it's pretty rare for students to go into their fifth year but it's used usually as a backup in case there are certain years for example where maybe you're too busy maybe there's a financial constraint that year and you don't have the money to study and so you can take a whole year out and they and then by having up to five years that gives you the flexibility just in case your personal circumstances do change that much it's uh it's probably more common than you'd realize um and the other part that makes it a very flexible course is that the study is completely asynchronous which means asynchronous so out of time basically which means that you don't need to attend any live lectures at all throughout the program I've said before you can come and join the live lectures if you like that's no problem but all the materials for you to study the program are based around the recordings of the videos of the lectures plus extra materials and the idea being that it's flexible week to week workloads so if you have a week if you're a student who's working in a job and you've got a very high workload week so you don't have much time to study then this flexibility allows you to easily catch up in future weeks without any problems so quickly to go through what modules you'll be studying on this on this degree so the there there is no option in terms of the module diet because this follows the IPAM accredited uh route so all the modules you choose here you must complete to finish the degree but what you can choose is if you're a multiple year student which which modules you will take in which year so however you do it you might be a full-time student in which case you take all of these modules in the same year but if you're a multi-year student then we recommend you start off with the basics of these introductory foundation modules on ionizing radiation physics and medical imaging with ionizing radiation so that teaches you the basics of x-ray interactions and x-ray detectors and also looks at x-ray imaging in some detail looks at CT scans it looks at nuclear medicine so very using radioactive sources as well as SPECT and PET scanning as well as a bit of radiation safety in there and then in your final year we would expect you to complete your main master's research project which is a substantial piece of work but also this module which is the group project module the medical device enterprise scenario so those are two research projects that you take one individually and one as a group as part of the master's I'll come back to those a bit later though and then in the middle you might choose to take any of these modules depending on which year you want to study and these include imaging modules like MRI and biomedical optics and biomedical ultrasound but also more treatment focused modules like radiotherapy physics clinical practice and computing in medicine as well so how does studying work typically over the year I thought I'd just go through a breakdown like month by month roughly what how you'll be studying and what it's like because I think a lot of people who join the course have not studied distance learning before or maybe they've not seen how we do it and so the idea is to give you a quick run through here so at the start of the academic year in September you'll have your induction when you join the course ideally you'll meet your course mates online you'll meet your personal tutor which is me and then after that meeting we'll make a plan for you to decide which modules you might want to study that academic year as part of that induction then you learn the basics of how the course is going to run for you as you study and so we'll show you the online learning environment which is a UCL called Moodle which is a series of web pages of the databases where you you'll go to to all your studying throughout the course and then we'll give you your first tutorial so rather than me just telling you how you'll be studying each year I'll be showing you so I'll just give you a task to do I'll ask you do a little bit of research look up in the library for some journal articles read about that do some data analysis on some detector data and watch a video a lecture video and ask some questions and hopefully give you a taste of how that studying is going to work throughout the rest of the year because it's the same process in in the induction that you'll be following up on later showing you all the tools that you'll need to do basically another thing we we recommend that you you do as much as possible is to have some collaboration with your fellow students on the distance learning course and there's a couple of methods you can use for doing that using our online forums but also we use Google Docs quite a lot as a way to anonymously interact with each other and if we're meeting you as groups then we meet on teams and we'll give you a taste of that as part of the induction but essentially we'll give you this this starter course just to let you see how the program is going to work over the coming year then when term really starts is October and generally UCL UCL's got three term structure so term ones from October to December term two from January to March and term three is April until June the third term is the space for the exam so there's no teaching in that term on campus you would normally study one module in one term so you would do 10 weeks of lectures from October to December if you're a part-time student then we actually recommend you study in a more flexible way which is using the recordings of the videos to study a single module instead of from the start of term one to the end of term one is that you do it at half the speed but from October through to March and that just means that it gives you a lot more flexibility if your work life can get on top of you and you and you don't have the time to study each week so essentially if you miss the weeks of lectures it's very easy to catch up that if you don't have as much to do and that's the purpose of studying at half that speed so roughly you'll be studying about one to two hours of videos per module per week if you're if you're part-time student and then you get extra resources that go with that as well it's worth saying if you're full-time then we recommend that you study by the more traditional full-time method and you're you essentially do yeah one module you'll do a series of modules that complete in one term as well so as well as those videos that's not the only way you recommend you study there'll be a series of self study problems and opportunities for you to share your work with other students so as well as getting feedback from your tutor I think a key with distance learning is to make sure that you're being active with whatever you're doing it can be effective for students just to watch videos or read library books but much better is for you to do something that requires you to think about it yourself writing notes to do data analysis to answer questions that get you to really engage with the materials and so that's a big focus of the program in terms of not just being these videos and textbooks to read through but give you something more active for you to really engage with your learning and so on top of those kind of extra exercises and quizzes you'll see you'll get opportunity to look at online textbooks and other resources as well to help you keep sort of online for your studies throughout the program we would expect that you you aim to complete certain lectures by certain dates which is shown in this timetable on the right here so you can see by each module is broken up by topics and you study each topic by each week and then hopefully you'll be at a point where you completed enough of your studies that would be able to submit one of the tutorial submissions which happen at regular points throughout the year those tutorials work in a way that allow you to get some feedback and hopefully they're checkpoints that keep you on target to complete the modules by the time of the exams so here is some examples of like online sharing forums so the little exercises you might do we encourage students to upload their work and compare with each other to give you the same kind of experience as if you're sitting next to a student in the lecture theatre and you just turn to look at their work and said oh what would you do on that problem it's an aim to replicate that same process and yeah the online google forums we use quite a lot as another way to ask questions and get help from people on the course so tutorials I've mentioned this already um there are regular tutorial meetings you'll have uh with me the tutor throughout the year and the structure of these tutorials are that you'll will be asked to complete an exercise you'll have be asked to submit that exercise in Moodle the answers that you have I'll mark it and then give it back to you and give you feedback and then the following week we meet and we have a conversation about how that went we go through any problems you have so you make sure that you're getting good feedback do you understand these topics and you can ask questions and if you need any extra help with anything basically so again we're trying to make it as active as possible for you as you study and to make sure you're properly supported as you study now these tutorial exercises can cover a range of different topics um some of them are problem solving more mathematical type problems some of them will be literature reviews looking through the academic research journals to find information that will be useful to know either for your projects or for your modules some of them will be data analysis of experimental data some of them will be using research software programming tools are pretty common and very useful as well so you'll see a bit of that and also at the end of the day we want all our students to do really well in the course and get high exam marks so some of them are exam question practice as well so all of these exercises you get feedback on and you get a chance to talk about and ask questions about so that's how our tutorial systems work throughout the year so examples that you might see this is one for computing and medicine filtering in the frequency domain taking some images and doing some analysis on them here so and then so we start with a brain image and then we follow it up by looking at some this is some cell images from electron microscope looking at nerve cells in the brain and doing some image analysis on that as well so that's a pretty typical thing you'll see so most then we get to assessments which are generally in May or June then in term three as I mentioned so the exams will be then certainly the structure of the program is that you're studying the exact same degree as the on-campus version so you get the same assessments that they do as well so you're sitting the same exams at the same time as we do here on campus and for this coming year all of our modules will actually be sat online using the platform assessment UCL that's pretty typical here on campus as well most modules in our department are also run by online exams now as well so they are technically open book but they're timed online exams where you need to download the paper write your answers out and then reupload them by the end of the exam period most modules also have a coursework meaning an extra exercise that counts towards the final module mark and they're usually integrated throughout the year up to about 20% is fairly typical of a module and they're usually problem solving or some data analysis and those kind of tasks and they're integrated into the tutorial slots so those regular points that we we check up on you throughout the year you get an extra exercise to complete so rather than overloading you with lots of work to do the courseworks are fed into that system so you complete those courseworks within that tutorial time frame as well so here's an example of an exam paper for a couple of years ago so on to research projects so this is obviously a major part of any master's degree it's actually worth one third of the total degree mark for any master's degree so 60 credits out of your maximum 180 credits you'll take you'll study it in your final year no matter what that is so if you're full time then your first year is your final year so you study it then and if you're part time then we recommend that you study it in your final year again so that you can use the things you've learned in the modules you studied as part of your search project there's a couple of major ways that students do that as a distance learning student the first is that we can develop you a local project with academic support based here at UCL so if you've got an environment perhaps if you work in a hospital or if you work in an industry with access to relevant you know equipment medical engineering related equipment then you can use it and develop a project there and we'll help you do that and often that's a very good way of doing it particularly for students who are working in hospitals there's an opportunity really for you to interact with your colleagues there and sort of further yourself at work as well as with us if you do that then we assign you a supervisor here in department with a with the same expertise who'll be able to support and your project and contribute to it as well the second alternative is that you sign up to the standard list of master's project proposals we have here in department at the start of the year academics in the department propose projects for master students and the master students just apply for them they look down the list of the ones they like and if they like the sound of it then they can join it as long as they've got the skills so you'll see again from all the research groups in the department you get an opportunity to join any of those in theory as the distance learning students there will be a couple that you may not be able to do if it requires you to collect the data yourself in person but most of the projects will allow you to to join them through the data analysis the data analysis is often the core of most master's projects so um so actually you're available you should be able to join a lot of these so that research project has regular assessments throughout the year to help you progress there's sort of checkpoints again you start off with an outline then you have a progress report there'll be a point later in the year where you have uh you must submit a research poster and join in the research poster conference that we have here on campus um and then at the end of the year you submit your thesis which is your final dissertation on on the research you've done and ideally what we'd hope from you is that any master's project is that that you do a piece of research of quality high enough that we can publish it in a research journal and there may be if you're interested you could stay for a phd afterwards it's one of the more common ways that students get phds in our department is to do a master's project and impress their supervisor there and therefore their supervisor looks for funding to to recruit you as a phd student going forward so that's funny that's an opportunity for you if you study with us um and then the other thing you have we have a research project in your final year is the group project the medical device center so this is a group project where you will work with students on campus in a group to solve a medical problem so at the start of the year we give the group each group a medical problem to solve and we say can you please find a way to solve this problem by making a brand new medical device uh the idea being you might the device has to be completely new so you can't be replicating someone else's work and then you have to make a business plan of how to take it to market so the groups here we got on campus i mentioned last week at the general postgraduate uh session that we've got students with all kinds of different backgrounds and the idea is to make use of those to you know combine all those different skills from those backgrounds in a way that's that that's interesting and helpful basically so you've got computer scientists in your group you'll have you'll certainly have physicists and various types of engineers they'll have different skills to contribute to the group output so here's an example of some devices that that have been made in previous years uh a couple years ago covid was a was a very big deal obviously and so there was the task that year was to make some support devices to help someone suffering from covid this is an electrical stimulator you can see in the bottom here that that was made by one group to to uh help uh strengthen someone's cock muscles if they needed to cough badly to get mucous out of their lungs and so literally our electrical shock provided to the abdomen of the which could contract and support you in a cough to give you the strength because a lot of covid patients ended up quite weak and this was a supportive way to contribute to that as well so another year one of the one of the tasks was to create technology for the visually or hearing impaired people and so we've got a little mouse braille reader here that a group made which looks like a mouse and you run that mouse over the top of any text it had an automatic imaging device in there that could read that text and then convert it to these pins you'll see on the top of the mouse that which will raise up and down and give you the braille version for people who are blind so really interesting devices it's often the highlight of many students uh study on the masters that a chance for you to be creative and come up with something yourself as well as work with other students and so every group has a distance learning student on it so at least one every year and so we're very used to integrating our online students with our campus students in this module it's something that I have to do quite a lot myself as well you know every academic has collaborators internationally that that we sometimes have to work around and so it's similar for you as students so we expect our students to deal with our international online distance learning students at the same time um if you'd like to know a little bit more about the department generally and some of the research that's being done there's all kinds of things you can look up later i'll put up the link for our for our department's twitter which i think is a good thing to follow if you want to see the latest research being done in the department but there's also this which is rank guns radio a podcast that i was involved with that involves conversations with academics about the their research profiles basically and uh there's a few of them you'll see covering some of the broad topics that are researched in our department the aim of it is to be very accessible so you don't need to be an expert in MRI to understand the MRI episode it's all explained in there so i'd highly recommend having a look on that it's on soundcloud type it in ronkins radio it's named after the the man who discovered the x-rays for the first time so that's why ronkin so as a distance learning student um you've also got some other opportunities to to join the department really we just say we want you to be part of the community as much as possible and we will treat you that way so if you want to speak to other lecturers it doesn't matter that you can't knock on their doors email and speak to them and ask them to ask to speak to them on teams it's really regular you know especially since the covid pandemic our groups are very happy talking on teams and speaking to students answering questions or just you know giving career advice on all that kind of thing as well you'll also see in department we've got monthly research seminars that we encourage students to join they're generally one either hybrid or on teams so you can always join those as well even if you're a distance learning student and to make use of the ucl careers team who are really really good at helping find jobs helping you improve your resumes and and think about your careers more generally um so yeah that it really is a hope that you as a distance learning student don't get isolated in studying yourself but you come and join in the communities that we've got either with distance learning students or with our campus students as well and like you've got access to you know this world leading university so we really recommend that you make make use of that and come and come and see us careers after graduation and kind of talked a bit about this already but there are there are a wide range of different careers you can use on it at the end of the day we are an analytical engineering physics degree so you can use those analytical skills in a wide range of uh subject areas i would say that most students are looking to specialize with us um in order to have a career particularly in our subject area either as a clinical scientist in a hospital or as a you know med tech companies are pretty common as well but again make use of those careers teams afterwards i would strongly recommend that minimum requirements for the course we would hope that you would have an undergraduate degree or an overseas equivalent of a two one that's in a physics engineering or closely related subjects um we do have students with degrees that are slightly different to that occasionally we'll have students with backgrounds in radiography or in biology sometimes we see or chemistry that's all okay as well what we're really looking for is that you are able to complete the course as much as anything else so you'll need to have a certain level of mathematical ability you don't need a full maths degree for that and you don't need a full physics degree necessarily for all that maths but you do need to be familiar with the problem solving style that comes with that sometimes we will accept students with a 2-2 onto the program as well and that sort of depends on what else you can offer as part of your CV ideally some extra experience if you've been working in uh in in the subjects and got some experience specifically then that's always a positive we would look at your degree and see whether things like your research projects were strong uh and if you do that then we do sometimes accept students with two twos as well so if you've got any questions about that please do ask us so you can email our mission tutor or myself at any time for that as well and then finance for the program here you can see the course fees for the distance learning program which match the campus msc program fees the only difference here is actually for overseas students it's slightly cheaper for our fees for distance learning so there's a slight discount for studying by distance learning if you're an overseas student there part you don't need a visa to study with us because you'll be presumably studying from your home countries so it's slightly cheaper for that that could be helpful and there's a range of different postgraduate loans and scholarships that you can apply for just be aware the deadlines for some of these scholarships if you do apply for them are it are quite soon so you might want to look at that quickly if you're thinking of applying for specific scholarships okay great I think we're about finished I might come back to those questions a bit later but I'll just put up here on the screen some links that you might find interesting if you want to follow us over the next coming months either on Twitter or on Instagram pretty active if you want to look at our podcast as I say or look up UCL engineering as well so there's opportunities for you there but next I'm going to invite we've got some current students studying on the course with us this year and so I thought we just have a quick conversation with some of those guys and see if see first of all I'll interview them so you can know a bit about them and if you've got questions then you can ask them as well so back to welcome Connor and Tim who are both current students with us Connor and Tim are you there hi I have the wrong background on that's fine yeah there we go there we go great thanks yeah so yeah we've got two students here Connor who is a full-time student studying on the distance learning course this year and Tim who's a part-time student so a couple of different perspectives here Connor can I start with you if it's okay could you tell me a bit about yourself and your background how did you come to study on the program with us like why did you study why have you come to study at UCL this way um well I was hoping to get into a more medicine related field so I'd studied my undergrad as a as a physics student with open university I'd done distance learning before so it was something that I thought I might like to try again but with with a sort of view to eventually getting some sort of clinical adjacent job and I found this course it seemed like what I was looking for and it was so okay great yeah excellent so you're given your full time you started your projects already this year could you say could you tell us what your project is and how that's going so my project is a piece of software that is supposed to be able to remotely gather information on how field of view affects a laparoscopic surgery simulation so we're hoping to gather data on the effects of fields of view field of view in particular and mosaicing because apparently according to my supervisor this is quite a poorly substantiated limiting factor of keyhole surgery that everybody sort of brings it up as one of the limitations but but nobody really has quantified to what degree it's a limitation so right yeah and that project was that on the project list of proposals from the department that was yeah okay great so that's yeah that's one of the ways as I said you can you can just join one of the proposals projects and join that way so it's quite helpful and tim I'd like to move on to you that's okay um could you yeah that's fine yeah could you say a bit about yourself your current working situation and like why are you studying with us yes yeah yes so currently I'm working um as I suppose training medical physicists for a private radiation protection and medical physics provider so we work with the work with the NHS work with private healthcare companies and some industrial clients as well because that's a quite industrial uses of x-rays that often people don't um don't realize happen whether that's in research or testing of products and that sort of thing um so to further my career I was offered the chance to to undertake this masters uh and as I'm based just outside Birmingham it was perfect for to be able to do it remotely um so I'm lucky enough that the the company offered me one day a week so I'm doing it part-time over two years um so I study alongside work um I get one day a week which I get all my lectures done sort of in that time and then um most of the course work but it's occasionally a bit of evening work needed just when when times are busy um before that my I'd actually my undergrad in chemistry a little while ago now it seems so um the online stuff was totally new to me I'd never studied online really it was all in person I was used to but it's very easy to pick up and sort of the resources that are available um it's fine and the support I find is really good remote so yeah no problems with that yeah great um thank you that's really really nice comments as well um so yeah um Connor I didn't really ask you this yet but like how are you finding studying generally you've had some experience at distance learning before but as have you how are you keeping up is it how are you finding studying that way um yeah it's it's working well for me uh it's you know it's it's a lot of work as you'd expect from a full-time master's course but um yeah that largely uh the way the course is structured you can fit it around whatever's going on in your life uh provided you can make the time to study afterwards um do you consider yourself quite an organized person generally because I think that's some of the challenge that often comes to distance learning you need to organize your own time like more so than perhaps it on campus student does yeah I would say um well I'd say um I wasn't before I started doing distance learning in my undergrad but yeah um you have to become quite organized um when there's nobody actually physically telling you to do anything um there's a a need to organize yourself quite strictly yeah I think I I my experience of seeing students over the years study it this way I think it's another benefit actually of studying by distance learning um that if you if you've come out the other side of it you know and completed the program you've had to be more organized than a lot of other students and that means that actually you take skills into your future careers that many of our campus students don't necessarily have at this point because you know you're much more self-responsible uh and you can talk about that in interviews and things like that as well so uh we often end up I may be biased because you know I've been running this program but I often think our distance learning students are amongst our best students that we have basically and maybe it's a part of that and maybe it's because the quality like of Tim and Connor that joined the course in the first place but um we've seen it as well so a lot of our students in the we have a department prize for example for the best msc student and the best msc project last year's winner of the best project was a distance learning students um and we've had winners of the main msc prize as well by distance learning so yeah it's often it's often a successful route okay great um we've had some questions in the chat so I'll just uh I'll I'll go through those quickly um I've got a question from someone here saying I'm currently working full-time as an embedded software engineer in a medical company producing x-ray systems would this be suitable for me um yeah I mean obviously you would need to decide on it specifically what you're hoping to get out of the degree at the end of the day but particularly I've seen students with similar backgrounds to yourself you can sort of see that Tim's current position is not necessarily electric we've got students that work in hospitals for example doing radiotherapy planning which is very typical um these uh sort of more industry-based students are common as well certainly be suitable if you'd be interested and the background uh in in software engineering will be certainly very helpful as well I'm not quite sure what the rest of your background is but yeah if you've got further questions then do apply right and then answering the next question if you study on the flexible routes and would like to attend an in-person lab or lecture how much notice do you have to give to attend okay good question so um particularly because we've got Tim here because he's actually a student obviously he said he lives in Birmingham so he's been able to potentially come to some sessions so we have labs that are run on campus and sometimes students are able to come and join those labs in person and sometimes uh we can create extra sessions for students to do that lab separately Tim would you like could you tell us about the labs that you did you come and do one already and you've got another one to do later this month is that I've done I've done a lecture already I came down for a lecture and then you didn't come to your rooms as well I thought yeah because there's there's a lab on ultrasound imaging which I think you're doing that module this year actually I've got it next year yeah okay yeah so that's another opportunity but um but Tim's actually coming later this month to do the x-ray detectors lab that that did run in term one on campus but there's two distance learning students that are coming to do that in a separate session later this month so in terms of you can if you can attend the live sessions with the campus students then great sometimes it doesn't always work out that way and so uh it's often possible for you to come and do those labs anyway um so how much notice do you have to give to attend well let us know as soon as possible and we'll arrange something basically I think Tim we talked about this right at the start of the year that this might be a good opportunity and lastly we're trying to fit it into the schedule so that you studied enough of the module and that obviously you're that you're available to come as well so yeah there's definitely an option there's no like list of how much time you need to give um if you can attend the live sessions with the campus students then just let us know and otherwise ask us we're really keen to accommodate our students that way okay next question says uh you just said that we need some math background to study this masters exactly which modules are we expected to take in our undergrad so I can't speak directly because different universities have different courses there it's it's not so yeah in terms of modules we expect some definitely enough fundamental mathematics I would say most of the maths on this this degree is not to such a level that that you would be hindered from studying um you could come with some pretty low level skills you need to know you know the basic trigonometry the basic exponentials the basic work with calculus but not much more than say a first year physics students would normally do on their undergraduate degree um but enough to be able to solve those problems and be able to handle a bit of calculus but again most of the stuff that's taught that goes to a higher level is taught in the modules as well so if you need to have for example one of the modules talks about using major c's to solve some mathematical problems if you've never done that before that's actually fine because it's taught in the module as well so that's completely uh it sort of depends on your background if you've got questions about it whether your background is enough then send us an email to the admissions email address and we can we can give you an answer basically on that but generally we're looking to see whether you're capable it's not necessarily about um you know it's not necessarily about saying you haven't got enough here we want to check whether you think you've got enough to study because we don't want students joining a course when they can't do it basically so that's the aim now okay does anyone have any questions that they'd like to ask maybe Tim or Connor if you do then type in the chat if not that's absolutely fine as well yeah thanks Naomi I think she's Naomi's just put the link to the the email address for asking questions if you want it as well okay I'm not sure if there necessarily is so I'll I think I'll bring this session to a close overall then um the engineering faculty has asked us if uh if if you've attended this session and would like to give some feedback about the experience then then you can uh you know use this QR code to go to a form and give us some feedback as well so this is here if you if you'd like to do that but uh otherwise if there's no further questions then uh then thank you everyone for for joining and thanks to Connor and Tim for joining as well and answering the questions and hopefully I'll hear from you uh before you come to study with us uh in September thanks everyone okay see you later