 So, yeah, so I'm just going to start off with a quick introduction to UCL. We're going to meet some of the people we're talking to today. I will then go through, explain some of the more detailed aspects of studying by distance learning. And then, and then we should have a good idea, hopefully, of whether you'd like to apply it or not. So, UCL Engineering's motto is to change the world, you need to be taught differently. And that's certainly true of our distance learning program, a different way of studying for many people, but certainly an effective one we found over the years. So, as I said, we're going to be talking today about the physics and engineering and medicine, MSc, by distance learning, with mostly with two of us today, but we're going to have a couple of extra guests later who will join as well. So, I'm Billy Dennis. I'm the distance learning tutor for the Department of Physics and Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering. I'm also the postgraduate taught program's deputy program director. So, I can also answer quite a lot of questions if you've got queries about other courses that we do in our department that are not distance learning. You'll find me lecturing on modules, et cetera, as well. Also with us today, we've got the postgraduate taught program director, which is Professor Elias Taksidis. So, hi Elias. Hi Billy. Great to be here. Welcome everyone to our physics engineering in medicine by distance learning open day. So, I'm quite excited to welcome you to this open day and hopefully you can welcome you to UCL and the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering. Billy, can you show the next slide? I would like here perhaps to emphasize a couple of things about our department. We are part of the faculty of engineering and we are very strong in clinical and healthcare related research. We produce world leading and international X and Y research. And this is mainly to the fact that we actually develop and apply here the best of sort of engineering techniques and technologies. And we are surrounded by university college running hospitals and institutes that allow us not only to develop these technologies, these techniques, but to explore how these can be used to help patients in the hospital. And in fact, the key thing of this is the projects that some of our students are doing with our hospital partners. We are a small department. We have about 40 permanent academic staff, 12 research and teaching fellows. We've got quite a lot as you can see, post-doctor research staff. And we are very proud to be very sort of said research focused. And you can see this from our PhD student numbers, got 170 PhD student numbers. And indeed some of our PhD students are coming from attending our master's problems and then sort of wanting to follow our kind of an academic route. And we're very proud to have our students joining the department and helping us with our research. The next slide. So I want to hear perhaps to say a couple of things about the research. And first of all, just to let you know that we have a quite a nice website that describes our, of course, our teaching activities, but also our research activities. And I would definitely, definitely recommend that you spend some time to explore our research websites and to explore some of our research activities. Basically, what is happening is that we, our research is kind of like split it in different labs and groups. We have a group that, and a lab that works very, you know, quite significantly in medical imaging, using different types of technologies can be MRI, can be ultrasound, biomedical optics. A lot of my work, for example, is related to biomedical optics. And there is a research lab that is called biomedical optics research laboratory. And in there, you'll find all the different groups that do photonics developments as well. We have people that work and researches here, professors work on radiation physics, looking at advanced x-rays methodologies, proton therapy x-ray diffraction. And again, we have, you know, we work very close with the hospitals. And we just recently launched the new proton therapy Institute, which is just down the road. And we actually working very close with them. We have people that doing, you know, more kind of electronic engineering work, like looking at implanted devices like new modulation. We have a lot of collaboration with neuroscience and looking at new physics, but also doing, as I said, new imaging. And very recently also, we launched a new Institute of robotics and artificial intelligence and work very closely with artificial intelligence applications to healthcare, quite computing type of engineering there, and also, you know, looking at sense of robotics. So I'm just going to stop here and again, invite you, all of you guys, go and explore our website. I have a look at our research activities. I think it will make a huge difference for you to understand what exactly we can do in this department and why you should actually come and join our department. So Billy, I'm going to now hand it over to you. And, you know, and again, if any other questions or something, you can always connect with me and I'm quite happy, you know, to support and help you answer those questions. Thanks Billy. All right, thank you very much, Elias. So I'm going to go through and talk about the distance learning routes of the MSc on the whole. And I thought I'd just start with a quick history of where this course comes from. It was founded originally by Professor Joseph Rotblat, who was a Nobel Prize winner, although not in physics actually in the end, he was a physicist, but he actually got the Nobel Prize for peace as part of the nuclear disarmament movement that he was a leading figure on. Anyway, when he originally left the atomic bomb research development at the end of the Second World War, he moved to London and set up a radiation physics master's course to find more humane uses of radiation physics. And that's the origins of our course. Our heritage comes from that. Over the years, of course, the modules have changed, the lecturers almost certainly have all changed. Yeah, I think we've got one lecturer who's still lectured with us in the 80s. But yeah, of course, there have been updates over the years, but that's the basis of our MSc. And then in 2011, the distance learning route was open to replicate that successful long running MSc programme, but to do it online. It's the exact same course. And the idea is that you take the exact same assessments, and you get the exact same qualification as if you were studying in person in London. You get all the same experiences. You still get to do research with our excellent research groups, but you're just doing it from a place which may not be here on campus. And so our first graduates were in 2013, which probably shows to you that a lot of our students, particularly at the start of the course, were part-time studying students. Normally the MSc takes one year to complete here on campus, but you can study part-time more flexibly and take more years. And we're going to talk a bit about that later. But over the years, actually, we've had more students taking the distance learning routes full-time as well. But our first graduates in 2013. And then in 2015, the course, including the on-campus version and the distance learning, was accredited by IPEM. And it's the only distance learning MSc course in our subject area to be accredited by IPEM. There's a couple of pieces of significance about that. The first is that it shows the mark of the quality of the course that we've got a very high quality course and is leading in our nation. But the second part is that that accreditation means that for those of you who are looking for future careers, perhaps in the NHS as clinical scientists, you can use your MSc training here as part of that accreditation that you'll need. So it's a very useful accreditation for you, potentially as students. And I will just say, finally, it's been a very successful course over the years. We won personal tutoring awards at UCL in 2018 and 2019. And I think the reason for that largely is because we do insist on giving a lot of personal attention to our distance learning students, recognizing that it's a different way of studying. And sometimes that personal attention is really needed. And so we're very proud of that. And we continue to provide excellent personal support to our students. So as I said before, the distance learning roots of the MSc is in the radiation physics stream. On campus, you might know there's a computing stream and there's a engineering stream as well that have a slightly different focus. But this is in the radiation physics stream. And time to complete the distance learning course, you've got three main options that you can do. One is just do the MSc in a single year, which would be considered full time, which you would if you started the degree in September, this coming year, you'd finish by August 2023. There's something called part time, which specifically under UCL terminology means that it's a two year MSc. So you take half the MSc modules in the first year, half in the second year, and you complete over two years. But there's a third option, which is actually quite common on our distance learning students, which is up to a maximum of five years called flexible study. Now, you can actually choose within flexible study exactly how many years you'd like to complete the MSc over. But the idea is that if there are life circumstances that mean that you might not be able to study full time or even part time, or if you need to change your plans, then you can do that and you can take up to a maximum of five years. Most students don't take five years on that route. They actually take usually two or three years. But those extra years are available if something happens that means you need a bit more time. So in the past, we might have had a student who's maybe had some military service or had parenting responsibilities, and that meant that they had to slow down the rate at which they study. So they took an extra year, for example, to complete the MSc. The distance learning gives you the option completely if you would like to study completely alone. You don't need necessarily to interact with other students, apart from in one module, which is a group project module. So it allows you to focus completely on your own work, which is quite nice. But what's more recommended probably is that you join up with your cohorts that are studying with you to do some group work, to do exercise together, to develop your understanding together, because I actually feel that's by far a better way of learning. And then finally, you do have opportunities, even if you are registered as a distance learning student, you may come and visit campus whenever you like. It's not expected, and it's certainly not required. But if you are interested in coming for a visit to London, you might come for a two week period or something like that to come to lectures, to visit your research supervisors. And we do have students as well who come and attend some work experience with some of our clinical lectures, perhaps in the Institute of Nuclear Health, perhaps at UCLH and the Radiotherapy Department or the Proton Therapy Department. That's all possible to you. You're still a normal student, like any other MSc student, and you still get those same opportunities as if you were studying here in London. But you just need to book them in, basically. So here on the right, you can see an example of some of our students joining in a group session with in the lecture theatre. And we've got a couple of distance learning students studying online at the same time. So what kind of profile might you be in order to study with us? Well, I would say these three are probably amongst the most common and in various combinations. So we might have a student's background being in physics. We might have students' background being in engineering and in different forms of engineering often. Or we might have a student's background being in computer science. Those are probably the three most common. Amongst the reasons to study, we might have people who are working full-time in hospitals, such as Charlotte here. And they require MSc for the academic component of their clinical scientist registration in the NHS. And they will come to us and they'll study usually part-time, perhaps over two years, whilst working full-time in their job. In that case, perhaps their work, the hospital might give them half a day off a week to study or might give them a full day off to week to study. That would be very common. A second option might be something like if you're working full-time but not in a related hospital or in a related area. But you're looking to change into our subject area and into medical physics and biomedical engineering. And so perhaps you have a little bit less available study time per week. And so you might consider instead of studying MSc over two years, taking a little bit more time than studying over three years at a slightly slower rate. That might be for Wei Ren here, for example. And the final example, which is becoming more and more common over the last few years, is just to study full-time. Someone looking for an option to study but can't come to London for whatever reason or is their personal situations mean that they would actually be better off studying by distance learning. And I, as the distance learning tutor, can recommend this route actually as well. We do have a lot of students studying this way. Probably for the first time, they've not studied by distance learning in their career previously at schools and then their undergraduate is not very common. But I can actually recommend there's lots of good reasons why distance learning is in fact slightly better, depending on your particular lifestyle. So those are the three main sort of profiles that you might be thinking about. And that if you do it that way you'd have all the same opportunities as these first two, perhaps you want to go and work at hospitals later. But it might be that you're interested in following a career in research afterwards as well. You might join one of our department's research groups as a PhD, etc. But again, these are all very flexible, but these are just some examples that you might be interested in. So flexible study, we mentioned that already, and that is the real strength of the programme I would say overall, no matter which of the routes you take, part-time, flexible or full-time. The idea is that it's fully adaptable to suit your personal situation. Now for some people that might mean that you're working in jobs full-time or part-time. And so the flexibility of the programme means that you can study it even whilst doing those jobs and you don't have to attend lectures live and you can still complete the MSc and study well. It's also flexible in terms of a day-to-day basis. You can, if you have a busy work day, for example, when you need to catch up, it doesn't matter if you've missed out studying that particular day, you can catch up. It's flexible in a way that on campus teaching is not quite so flexible. So what we do ask for all our students, and this is probably more recommended for the part-time students, is that we ask you to enrol on your modules in September that year, and you commit to those modules for that academic year based on your available study time. That usually starts with a conversation with me at the start of the year to say how much study time do you think you've got, and I can make a recommendation to you. But the thing is when you commit to studying maybe three modules in your first year, you aren't committed to anything in future, so you can decide exactly next year whether your circumstances have changed and you might want to finish the whole MSc that next year. You maybe you've got less time available and you need to only study one module or have a full year out. That's the purpose of the flexibility of the course. You can completely change and you're not committed to anything other than the modules you registered on in this particular year. So as I said before, years four and five are generally backup years, but they can be used and occasionally are. And the final thing to say about the flexibility of the program is that the study is asynchronous, meaning that you do not have to attend any timetabled lectures during the week. So if you come and study here on campus, you might have your MRI lectures on Monday morning from 10 o'clock until 12 o'clock. That is not something that you have to clock yourself in for with our program. It's asynchronous, meaning all those lectures and all the study resources are available to you from the very start of the year. And again, that flexibility is really important for some people. So this diagram on the right here just shows you generally how a part-time student might study over the year. You start off by registering in September. In your modules, you start your modules from October and you study through to the exam period in May and June with a series of tutorials throughout the year to keep you on track. I'm going to talk a bit more about that in a minute. So what modules are on our distance learning MSc? Well, it's these ones right here. So this shows first year options and final year, as I've called it. And so if you're intending to study full-time, of course, you take all of these modules in your only year of study. If you're flexible or part-time, then you've got some options here. We generally recommend that you take these two modules first, ionizing radiation physics and medical imaging with ionizing radiation because it contains sort of foundational information that you could find useful in future modules. And then your final year should definitely include the two research projects, the group research project and medical device enterprise scenario and your individual MSc project so that you can use the things you've learned in these research projects. But in the middle here, you've got some different options. So quickly, just to go through what these modules include. Ionizing radiation physics, that's looking at the fundamental physics of how x-rays mostly, but also charge particles, protons, etc, can be used in medical applications. And it looks at detectors and how do we detect and measure the amount of radiation given there. Medical imaging with ionizing radiation, that's looking at the main imaging methods using ionizing radiation. So x-ray imaging, CT, nuclear medicines such as PET scans and SPECT scanning as well. And then finally, a little bit about a radiation protection, how do we make sure that we keep patients safe as we're exposing them to the ionizing radiation. Then in the option or modules, you might have MRI and biomedical optics. So magnetic resonance imaging, biomedical optics is a massive research area that's happening in our department right now. UCL is certainly among the world leaders in that subject. And what's great about it is it's relatively cheap technology and it's an open field with lots of exploration happening right now. And it includes things like lasers, it includes things like functional scanning of brains using optical methods, non-ionizing instead of x-rays. Really interesting module, that one. Clinical practice, that looks at anatomy and physiology for our subject area. Not to the level of needing that you'd need as a doctor, but certainly to a good level that you can apply it to all the imaging and radiotherapy modalities. It also looks at electrical medical devices in some detail as well. Radiotherapy physics is looking at actually all different forms of cancer therapy that we can do. And it follows on from the ionizing radiation physics. It looks at x-ray treatments, it looks at brachytherapy slightly, and it looks at the proton therapy that you'll find more about as you come to UCL. Biomedical ultrasound looks at ultrasound, not just for imaging but actually for new methods of treating cancer and other methods like that as well. Another really exciting research area. And then computing in medicine is another sort of key thing that any medical physicist or biomedical engineer is going to need for a future career in our subject. It's actually looking at using computing methods applied to medical images in order to collect data from them automatically in some way. So a good example would be to take a CT of a patient and then you can automatically write a computer program that will be able to outline the organs that you might want or a tumor that you might want to highlight so that we can use that to target it with radiation etc. A really important tool that you'll be using over your entire career for sure. So it's involving those computing methods. And then the final year, these two research projects, which I'll just talk a bit more about now or in a minute actually not after this slide. So quickly to describe to you what's a typical year studying by distance learning like. Well we start in September with an induction program where you'll meet your course mates, you'll meet your personal tutor, which in nearly all cases is myself. And you choose your modules for that year based on our conversations and what you want to get out of the out of the degree. Then you will hopefully learn the basics of distance learning. Some of you might have done some distance learning study over the last couple years, particularly the pandemic has meant a lot of people have gone that way. But this is a slightly different course in that it's designed to be run by distance learning. It's not just adapted like might have been quite done quite last minute for our for COVID mitigations. So the idea of this induction is to give you an example just to go through so that you get used to all the tools that you'll need to study effectively by distance learning. And the idea is you learn by doing it's not just information. We give you an exercise that requires you to study some lecture videos take notes on that to go to the UCL online library and get access to research papers and books extract some information from that that you'll need collaborate with your peers finding out ways to actually study effectively together whilst you're online a really important thing. And then finally solving problems yourself and then submitting your work online. So here's an example of the online library shown and there's a whole program to get you used to the course, particularly if you've not studied online before, but really to show you the kind of tools you should follow in order to effectively complete your studies with us. So week to week study on your modules happens between October and March for our distance learning course and each module is divided into sub topics based around the recorded lectures that we have here on campus. So you can see, for example, if you're doing ionizing radiation physics, there's four weeks of lectures on photon interactions with Dennis, which is myself, and you can really break that down so that you know exactly what you need to study each week in order to keep up with the course. So this is an example for part time students, but if you were full time, you would double that you go from about one to two hours of lecture videos a week up to about three to four per module. To go with that is a very important part is to keep you studying actively. And that's to do self study problems, but to have an active process in your learning, not just to read textbooks or just to watch lecture videos, which is not an effective way or really a fun way to study is actually find get your hands in there and solve some problems yourself. So these self study problems are a key part for you to study on the course and you can get some feedback, hopefully with working with your peers. And also you get feedback from your personal tutor myself as you study. And there's also all these extra resources we would expect. So as I said at the bottom here, variable studies normal. So, you know, over a week, you might have days that you're busy, and so you don't have time to study. And then you need to catch up a later. That's completely normal for online study. I think you need to organize your own deadline. The purpose of the course is to give you the flexibility you need to fit it in around the rest of your life. So this process allows you by organizing by topics, and then aiming at these tutorial structures that are set once or twice a term, then that gives you a deadline to meet to. So here's an example of sharing forums that we ask our students when they complete a little self study exercise, you upload it to a sharing forum, you can ask for feedback from me, the tutor, you can discuss problems with everyone else, see where you got stuck, etc. So here's a number of different ways that we do that. The study is so that that study schedule is based around these yellow parts here, the tutorials that we ask you their exercises, we ask you to complete as you study through the MSc. And there's three fixed tutorial review tasks for each module throughout the year. If you're studying part time and there'll be November, February and then March. And then we can organize extra tutorials in April and May. But the idea of these is that they are usually informal, a way for you to review the lectures you've just done, test yourself and get some feedback from me as to whether you've done it all correctly. Sometimes they will count as coursework and they will count towards the final mark of the module, but generally they don't. It's just an informal way for you to test yourself and keep up. So here on the right is an example of one of those tutorial tasks, which is filtering in the frequency domain and another one looking at more something fancy called morphological operations, which you'll learn about as you study on the course. So those tutorials have got different types of exercises. Some of them are problem solving, math style problems. Some of them will be literature reviews. Some of them will be data analysis from detectors or other imaging methods. Some of them will be using research software or doing a bit of programming to automate some of the processes we can do. And then some of them will be exam paper practice for you. They've got three main names. First of all, just to give you a target to aim at as you study so that you can keep up the course. We also really want you to pass the course and do really well. So they're also helping you for your final assessment as a purpose. So sometimes giving you specific practice or giving you specific feedback where you're going wrong or to encourage you if you're doing going the wrong way. They'll encourage you if you're going the right way. And then finally, some of the more educational in terms of we're trying to help you get some tools out of your study. We're not interested in you just learning the information that's part of our subject area, learning the facts. That's not really what's going to be most useful to you from the MSc. We want you to be able to develop the skills that you can use to solve problems in all kinds of different ways. So some of them are based on that principle as well. So generally, you'll submit work on the deadlines. It will be marked and then it's reviewed with the personal tutor via teams or telephone. And we go over the problems. We discuss them if you can answer questions and we can clear up any misunderstandings. As well as this, these are the fixed tutorial times when I'm always available to speak to students based around these work. But you can actually ask for tutorials anytime during the rest of the year as well. That's always available. I usually speak to my students quite a lot on a weekly basis by email and some students more often, some students less often. It really depends on exactly what you need. But the point is that we are very proud of the support we give. So I'm very available for our distance learning students. Then in May and June, you'll generally do your end of year exams. These exams are the exact same papers that you take that are on-campus students take. They're usually sat in a local exam centre to you. So we organise that in February or January of each year, a place that's convenient for you to sit and do your invigilated exams. Now, actually in the last couple of years, things have changed slightly. Because of COVID, these exams have been converted, these exams have been converted now to online versions of the exams. So I'm not sure if that will continue going forward. It's likely actually will. This year we're doing timed exams, but online. So in that case, you won't need the local exam centre. You'll be able to take it from home on your computer. Many modules have also got coursework, which means that, you know, components that are not the final exam that counts towards your module mark. So it's usually about 20%. And in the modules that have it, they're integrated into those tutorial deadlines. So those three deadlines that I talked about for the tutorials, they might include a coursework element rather than an informal exercise. Research projects, again, only relevant for those of you studying in your final year or if you're full-time, of course, you'll do it in your first year as well. You study those research projects from October through to August, through past the exams and into the August term as well. So let's talk about the individual research project first. It's worth four taught modules. So it's waiting as much higher. So you need to make sure that you're devoting a decent amount of time for it. And there's generally two ways that our distance learning students take their research project. They can either develop a local project for themselves that we support with our lecturers and professors here. Maybe you work in hospital and there's a research piece of research that could be useful to your job. Maybe there's a local institution that would be good for you to go into their labs and work in. That's possible and we support you doing that with an extra supervisor here at UCL. Also available is that you can just sign up for the list of master's project proposals that we give on campus here that are based on the research that our academics want to be done. It's worth saying as a master's student, the expectation is that you will do an excellent piece of research and really contribute to that research group. They're looking for you to solve questions that they want answered. It's not just a repetition or an exercise that's theoretical. We're looking for useful output from you. And so hopefully some students might end up publishing papers and staying for PhDs afterwards as well. If you're impressed during your MSc project, you can get recruited for PhDs. That happened. These on the right here show the different research groups in our department. Again, on our website that Elias mentioned, I would probably again encourage you if you're interested to look at those and see what kind of research is happening in the department. And then there's also the group project, which is a research project that you'll do in a group called the Medical Device Enterprise. So what is the Medical Device Enterprise? Well, you as distance learning students will take part in a group project with students here on campus. It's a mixed mode study project essentially. And the idea is that you're set a task at the start of the year and you'll need to try and solve that task by inventing a brand new medical device and writing a business plan to take that medical device to an investor and then be able to start that company and start manufacturing and selling that device. And it includes all the details that you would need in terms of technical specifications. What materials do you need? How much are they going to cost? How is it going to be constructed to the legal ramifications in terms of what regulations you can need to follow to make sure you don't hurt patients? What electrical parts? What mechanical parts are going to be relevant in there that you'll need to know about? And then finally, how are you going to market it? What is the target audience? How many people could buy this and what would be useful for? It's a really interesting applied project for you guys and it is led entirely by students. It's not led by academics. So this is your unique opportunity in the MSc to really test yourself and come up with something creative yourself. It's often one of the favorite modules on the MSc, really popular. So you hear you can see from this current year we are students that are on campus having a lecture from Dr. Martin Frye and on my laptop you can just about see that we've got our distance learning students joining at the same time in those discussions. So this is mixed mode. You will be in groups with our campus students at the same time and have to adapt to that as well. To give you an example of a couple of the different types of tasks that are set to you at the start of the year, last year's one was looking at COVID support devices. This little image beneath that shows an electrical stimulator that was used to help patients who are very weak in hospitals with COVID and might need some support in coughing. So that applies an electrical stimulator to the muscles of the abdomen in order to support a patient if they need to cough and they're too weak to do that. Really interesting project and they went into full detail in terms of the safety of that and the effectiveness of that as well. Really interesting. Previous years, here's another example, the task was to find some technology for the visually or hearing impaired. So this is a Braille reader that was invented to suit that. It looks like a little mouse but it's got a little scanner underneath. The mouse as you move that mouse over text, for example a book, then it converts that to the Braille output on these little pins you can see here on top of this mouse-like object. So it's a live converter and they made the thing. It was really, really great, really interesting. So this is a really interesting project for you as well that you'll take part in. Finally, if you want to know a little bit more about the research group specifically or find if you're unaware of what's possible in medical physics or biomedical engineering then you might consider listening to our department's podcast which I'm producer for called Röntgen's Radio named after the discoverer of X-rays. Have a look, it's on all the podcast apps basically and it's really interesting. There is a discussion show with a researcher about their research and it's at a level that anyone can understand so you can share it with family members. It's certainly applicable for any of you guys who might be interested in the course. You want to learn about MRI, the latest techniques, you want to learn about electron microscopy and what you can do with it in medical physics then have a look at that podcast, I really recommend it. Another thing to say is that you'll be a department member. As a distance learning student you're not in the room but you're very much part of our community and we hope that you'll take advantage of the resources that UCL gives you as a distance learning student with us. You're not isolated, you may email speak to your lecturers on teams in person, you can join our lunchtime research seminars that are on a monthly basis. You can make use of our careers resources and support team which we're going to talk to every so and a moment about that. You can come and visit London, that's good as well. Distance learning students, no requirement ever to come to London in terms of your study but if you would like to you can do that. You can come and use our study resources on campus, you can speak to our lecturers, you can get some work experience if you need it and we want you to collaborate as part of your research project with the groups and hopefully our research projects allow you to do that. So I'd really encourage you to make use of the opportunities that UCL gives you. So careers after graduation, where do people go? Perhaps I'm just going to pass over to a member of our excellent UCL careers service who are really available, they're available for you as you study on the course and afterwards and they're an excellent resource. I'm just going to look pass over to Arusa who's going to talk about exactly what the career service do. Hi so I'm Arusa, I'm the internships and vacancies officer part of UCL careers and part of the engineering careers team. So we specifically support engineering students during their time at UCL as well as up to three years after they graduate with career guidance. Some of the things that we support students and graduates with include checking applications and CVs, helping prepare for interviews, coming up with a tangible action plan as to kind of the next steps that they could go on to do as well as signposting to resources that are related to areas of interest. In addition to that we also work quite closely with employers when it comes to recruitment. So we support employers with advertising, graduate and internship vacancies through our jobs board, especially ones targeted specifically at engineering students and we also have employers that attend events and I should mention as well the careers appointments are both virtual as well as in person so you do have the option to have those appointments virtually and then the career events that we host which we work quite closely with employers with a wide range of different employers. Those are also currently virtual and we're looking at having those both virtual and in person moving forward to give you a bit of information about what graduates in this area go on to do and in terms of the job roles. So some of the roles include medical physicist, management consultant, structured products, marketing sales officer, trainee clinical scientist, clinical researcher, associate recruitment consultant, associate physicist, radiotherapy, physicist, electrical and biomedical engineer and clinical engineer. So these are just some of the roles that our graduates have gone on to do once they've completed the course and to share a bit of information about some of the employers that they've gone on to work with. These include KPMG, Hayes, PhD, medial imaging, Remedica image, I hope I'm saying that right, the Northwest London hospitals, NHS trust, the Lister hospital, Cambridge University hospitals, Plymouth hospitals. So those are just a few employers that our graduates have gone on to work with once they've completed their time at UCL. So yeah, just to kind of summarize in terms of the support we can provide. So we can support with applications, you can have one-to-one guidance and this includes looking at your applications as well as mock interviews. We have regular events that we run with employers. These are panel events and you have a chance to network with them. And as I mentioned before, these are both virtual and in person. We can also signpost you to relevant careers resources, support you with exploring a particular area or provide you with more information where relevant. And we also have vacancies as well, which employers post on our jobs board and we support them in connecting with you. If there's any questions, please do put it in the chat box or the Q&A box and I'll try and provide more information and if there's anything careers related. Great, thank you very much. Yeah, we'll save those questions until the end, perhaps. I'll just quickly go through a couple more bits of business. The entry requirements for the course, we generally require a 2-1 UK bachelor's degree or overseas equivalent in physics, engineering, computer science, mathematics or other closely related discipline. Additionally to that, if the applicant has a 2-2 degree, we also do accept those degrees as well, but they might be invited for a short online chat to talk about the suitability of the course with us. We mostly are interested in checking that this is the right course for you. It is competitive so we do encourage you to imply, but yeah, those are the minimum requirements for the course. Financially as well, you can see here on screen the course fees for next academic year for UK and overseas students and you should be aware that there's a couple of schemes that you might look into for financing your study through either the UK government postgraduate student loans. There's also a series of scholarships that the UCL ran centrally. There's not a department one specifically, but you might find that you can apply for those scholarships. You'll need to see if you're eligible by looking through the UCL scholarships web pages first though. And that's the end of my presentation for today. So I'll just think I've stopped sharing screen. We're going to go and talk now very quickly to one of our current students who is Seema. She's a first year distance learning student at the moment studying flexibly. Seema, hi, would you mind turning your camera on and saying hello to everyone? Hi everyone. Hi, great, thanks for coming. Perhaps you could start, could you just tell us a little bit about why you decided to study by distance learning with us? Yeah, basically I did a master's in engineering 10 years ago. So I wanted to get back into a similar field, but I'm currently living in Dubai. So there's not many opportunities here for further education. And this just seemed perfect. Yeah, great. Excellent. And how are you finding studying so far? You've been with us since September last year. How are you finding it generally? How many modules are you taking this year? Just so everyone knows. Three modules this year. So I'm going to try to do it on the three year track. Yeah, great. And do you have any advice for studying effectively by distance learning? What's good and what's effective for your studying so far? I know you're doing well, but perhaps you could describe it. To be honest, it's very easy to navigate. The online system is really good. It's flexible. I don't currently work, but I'm a stay at home mom. So it's very flexible for me, which is good. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Great. Oh, that's good. Yeah, how about how do you find the lecturers generally? Because it's interesting. Yeah, there's a very broad range of lecturing styles. But yeah, I'm happy with all of them. Which ones have you been studying so far? You don't need to know the lectures, but topics, perhaps. Oh, topics. Ionising radiation, that's one of my modules. Imaging and MRI. I'm doing biomedical optics. Yeah. So do you know what your future plans are after the MSc? What are you hoping to do afterwards? I was hoping you wouldn't ask me that. Okay. We don't need to answer. Sorry. Probably should have given you warning beforehand. But yeah, so there's a lot of different options. Perhaps if you've got any questions for Seema you'd like to know, then you can ask it in the chat as well. And we can ask her and see what she says. Yeah, I've not held anything over Seema. She's be very honest and I'd encourage us to be honest if there's problems or anything else. But we generally hope that we support our students well. And if you want to ask about specifics, then you can do that and study it as well. So thank you Seema, perhaps unless it's anything else you'd like to say about the course. Yeah, it's been very supportive. Like you're always available, very quick to reply. So the support's really good. Okay, great. Excellent. Thank you. I'm going to go to the questions now. And if you've got any more questions, feel free to type them in the chat or the question and answer box as well. I'm just going to go through and answer some of these. So first one we've got here is actually about one of the other MSc programs in the department. It was has any medical student holding a bachelor's degree in medicine and surgery ever been admitted to the MSc and medical robotics and AI course? And what should a final year medical student do to build a portfolio for securing admission to that program? So yeah, that's one of our programs that assist the program to the physics and engineering and medicine. There's options to take some of the same modules as well. I would say that program is really aimed, you would need to have a significant background in programming and some form of computer science to be admitted to that program. So it's not impossible for a student to have a medical background for sure, but you'd need to have significant academic experience with programming skills because that's the major part of the course. It does not start from scratch. If you've never done any program before, then that's not really a program that would be appropriate for you. The MSc in physics and engineering medicine, the computing and medicine course actually does start from a principle that you've never done any program before. So that might be a good way of leaning into that, but that particular program on medical robotics and AI assumes a certain level of experience already actually. So it would depend. You could probably email the course runner who's Matt Clarkson. Again, if you look on the Graduate Perspectives website, you'll find details on how to contact him if you want to ask that. But yeah, you want computing skills really. Great. Any other questions? I've had another one in the chat from a while ago. So if you do not have any background in biology, are you able to handle this program? Yes, absolutely. It's a program aimed at physicists and engineers generally, so we don't expect that you would have any background in biology. There's no requirements on that at all. Nearly all the modules do start from a principle that you can do some problem solving and you've got some physics and engineering background in some way, but they also teach you from the fundamentals. On the biology side, there's one course that teaches anatomy and physiology for medical physics and biomedical engineering, and that starts from scratch. So no biology requirements at all. Is the mathematical representations in robotic control theory and systems module, mainly Z and Laplace domains? I'm afraid I'm not sure I can answer that. That particular module is a relatively new one. So if you send an email, I would recommend to the department question box. But again, if you look on our department on the course perspectives for the department, then you should find the contact details which is Medford's teaching at UCL.ac.uk. If you send an email today, you'll get an email to answer that. That's not a module I'm thoroughly familiar with, so I think you'd probably need to ask that one personally. So Naomi kindly put Matt Clarkson, Dr. Matt Clarkson's details in the chat. And she's also putting that question, that contact detail in as well. Great. Great. Another question. In terms of entry requirements, I have a background of radiography with experience in both x-rays and MRI. Would I meet the entry requirements? So yes, potentially we do accept students in radiography degrees, particularly if they've got some extra work experience related like it sounds like you do. The main concern we have is that you have the required mathematical ability to solve the problems that come up in the course. So usually there's some, we'd expect some description of what that you do have that mathematical ability in some way, but that's another common way. We have lots of students with radiography degrees that come in as well. And in theory, you develop the skills that you need as you study it anyway. So you don't necessarily need a full physics degree. It will also depend on the grade you've got. You still need to meet the entry requirements in terms of a 2, 2, 2, 1. Basically 2, 2 minimum, but a 2, 1 would be automatically fine. Other questions in the chat. There is another one. So when do I expect to get a reply? I submitted my application in early January 2022. So the process of approving the applications usually takes between one and two months. It depends on the busyness at the time of the year. Right now is quite a busy time of year. So I'm sorry if you haven't had a reply yet, a decision on your application, I'm sure it will be coming very, very soon. Yeah, there are lots of applications coming partly through our graduate admissions office at UCL and partly through the tutors, the admissions tutor who decides whether you should be made an offer as well. But that will hopefully be coming soon. But sometimes it does take a little longer. So yeah, please do be patient. Which program were you applying for? Are you applying for the MSc Physics and Engineering Medicine or one of the other ones? Feel free to answer there. I'll move on to another question in the meantime. So is there any AI research towards spiking neural networks? Again, probably a question for our computing specialist in the department. I'm a medical physicist myself. So again, I'm not particularly familiar exactly whether that content is covered, but I will say that the modules that are coming, that are available in our department, are very much on the leading edge of new techniques. They're being taught by people making the science, making the new computer science as they do it. So but again, that might be a good question to email to Matt Clarkson, for example, who is running the MRI, the medical robotics and AI route. There's actually also a possibility in future, but this is probably a couple of years away, for an MSc program coming in medical imaging and AI. So there's actually a lot of expertise in our department in artificial intelligence methods that apply to medical imaging, etc. But I think you'll probably need to email specifically about that. Didn't see in the list of publications. So yeah, it does. You'll need to ask. I'm afraid I'm not particularly familiar exactly with that. But if you do ask the correct people, I'm sure you'll get an accurate answer. So I'm not sure. Sorry now. Any other questions? Yeah. MSc physics. Okay. So yeah, physics and engineering medicine. Yeah, that there should be replies within one or two months. Basically, as I say, it's quite a busy time of year right now. One other thing to say perhaps is that the application deadline for the course you'll find on our graduate perspectives. The application deadline is the end of March this year. There's a possibility if there are still places available on the course that that deadline will be extended. But if you have an intention to study with us from September this year, you need to I recommend you apply as early as possible and don't necessarily rely on that being open a bit longer. I know that there are some people working in NHS hospital departments who need a little bit longer for funding to see whether they get their funding for their course for their studies before before that might not come through until what after March. I'd probably recommend that it might be worth applying any way in that case. If you want to start in September, you don't have to attend necessarily you can actually defer your decision if that's something that doesn't come through. I'd probably recommend that you apply to before the deadline to ensure that that you do get their place. It's no guarantee right now whether it will be extended. Those decisions actually made by UCL centrally and there are so many applicants to UCL's courses that they may decide to close the lot if UCL is full as it were anyway. Will the related careers be more about facing machine or facing people? That's an interesting question. Both is certainly the answer. We're a department of physicists, engineers and computer scientists generally. So there are people that work heavily with the clinics and they do patient studies and there are people who work exclusively with software and machinery. So it's up to you basically. You get to decide there's certainly reach areas in both. So it's an expanding subject. It certainly could be that you would specialise yourself essentially and hopefully there's opportunities in both. We find that they go well together like a bit of both taking new techniques to the clinic is an important thing that we all do. So far how many people have applied for the MSc non-distance learning learning program? I don't have the data for you right now but I think it's towards about 100. So it does generally each year. I showed you that slide at the start of about our student numbers. We end up with about 60 MSc students across the department. It kind of depends if you are offered a place on the course then you can come. You don't need to worry about numbers once you've had your offer basically. So in terms of studying with other students, the course is there's lots of collaborative work between students if you're worried about that. Distance learning, the numbers are generally slightly a part of that. We generally have between 25 and 20-25 students a year on distance learning program. So that gives you an idea of numbers there at least. Okay I'm worried about the mathematics aspects within the MSc. What level of support is provided so I can get better at this? So yeah there's a decent amount of support. The starter course when the induction for the distance learning MSc for example includes of what's called a maths primer that basically gives you an idea of this kind of things we expect you to be able to do and gives you a bit of help to solving that as well. Every module starts from like a freely basic principle and so the skills are developed as you study those modules going through but ultimately most of the support comes through how much you want to contact either your personal tutor me or the lecturers in case as well. So there's lots of problems and we recommend that students go through problems to help their understanding and if you're worried about the mathematics you should probably spend some more time on that and ask for more help. You know we're very giving with our time towards our students so it's up to you to choose how much help you get. What is the tuition fee per year for part-time study? So that's a good question that's something that I if you if you send an email to me then I'll give you the specifics basically there's a document breakdown but basically each module the fees for one module is divided based on the number of the fees for that year. Each module is worth one-twelfth of the total fees for the course so if you're if you're part-time and taking three modules look at the full time fees and then take three-twelfths of that module. The exception of course is the MSc research project which is worth four modules as I said so that's worth a third sorry of the total fees so that they're portion based on the weighting of each module in the course and so each taught modules are 12th so the fees for for three modules in your first year for example would be three-twelfths as that makes sense so hopefully that breaks down clearly but if you want the specifics on that then do email me and I and I'll send you my explainer document that I give to all our students to explain that and it also tells you when you can pay your fees because you you don't have to pay your fees at the start of the year you can pay installments throughout the year and there's extra information on that as well. Billy I've just popped the part-time fees from the prospectus into the chat box as well for anybody I'm not sure if that's the the most accurate. Yeah I'm not sure that's actually yeah it's what it's yeah it does depend so with the part-time because it's two years I'm not sure that's actually accurate because if you study part-time the most normal way to study is you take four taught modules in your first year and then second year you take four taught modules and your research MSc project so actually you end up paying more fees in second year than in the first year the the weighting slightly different one third and two thirds but yeah it's weighted by the total number of credits you take that year basically that's how that's how it does break down I think those part-time fees are actually from last year actually Naomi and because looking at the overseas total it looks it looks too low or maybe I think the part-time fees might just be half because because the part-time MSc is two years the full-time MSc is one year so that might just be averaging on half but yeah my email if you want to contact me is so yeah I am Billy Dennis but my name my fault my legal name is William so my email is w.denis at ucl.ac.uk but again if you email medfist.teaching the the one that Naomi has already put in the chat then then it will get to me as well it gets forwarded by our our administration team to me so if you'd like to email me specifically then do great any more questions I haven't answered yet yeah I'm not sure I've got any more questions here right now but if you do have any then please do email me I'm happy to answer as well again that application deadline is the end of March so I encourage you to get your applications in if you if you can and thanks for coming everyone and thank you to Naomi for organizing this and to Rusa and to Seema for coming up to talk to us very briefly as well other than that goodbye nice to nice to nice to meet some of you