 So this is the webinar to introduce you to the MSc in Development Studies. We are looking forward to seeing you in September. We hope that by that time the current world situation becomes much better. Let me also say hello to Alice here. First of all, you are all people who have got offers for the MSc Development Studies or are looking for offers in MSc Development Studies at SOAS. So let me just quickly take you through what you are. Yes, hello Ibokun. We have just started. So we are just going to go through. If you can't hear me, okay, then please just adjust your microphone because some of you can hear me. Yes? Krishna, you can hear me. Yes. Okay. So whoever cannot hear me, please adjust the volume. Okay. So, you know, as you can see, we would like to welcome you here in SOAS in September 2020. We are quite sure that by that time the situation will improve and that we will be able to meet in person. We are looking forward to seeing you in September. So when you come to SOAS, what you are going to find is that we are among the world's most diverse institutions and that we will basically be in a campus where you will be with students from many, many different countries. And then we will have one year of highly intensive teaching as well as you are going to be able to have interactions with staff and students from a variety of different countries. You are obviously aware that our SOAS campus is among the world's most diverse campuses in the world and among our teaching staff as well, you will find that we have people from many different countries among the lecturers and among the teaching fellows. So what we are hoping to do is via our one year master's degree, you will make a major difference to the way in which you view the world and especially the way in which you view the problems facing developing countries and we will help you think about how to have solutions to these problems. Okay, can I just ask you whether you heard everything that I said and it came to you clearly? Yes. Okay. All right. That is great. Do stop me if you have a question. Okay. But what I'd like to do is to first run you through the program structure and then I will take questions from you. But if there is anything that you would like to have me answer while I'm speaking, then of course please go ahead and you do that. Okay. All right. So the structure of the course and the teaching format is the following. For everyone who's coming for the Masters in Development Studies, the MSU Development Studies, you have two so-called core courses that is required for you to take and these two courses are taught over two terms. One of these courses is called the Theory, Policy and Practice of Development. This basically is a course that has borrowed from different social sciences, anthropology, geography, some history, political science, sociology and the second one is a course which is called the Political Economy of Development and this is a course which is basically an economics course for non-economics people. People who have not had any economics background before can easily take this course and they will be able to understand basic economics as it relates to developing countries. We are aware that many of you people do not have an economics background so this is a course which is not a quantitative economics course. What it will help you do is to be able to understand the way in which different data is used in international development and we have a course that will help you understand economics which is called an Economics for Beginners course and that is not a course on which we take any exams for you. That is just for you to help understand the course on Political Economy of Development. The format for our teaching in Solace is a one-hour lecture per week and also a one-hour tutorial per week. In the lecture we normally have a large gathering of people so for example this year the core courses will have something like 150 students in a large lecture theatre format and then you break into tutorial groups one of them per course per week that is basically a one-hour session and there you are in groups of around 10 to 12 people. There are four optional courses that you will be required to take. These are courses which are run over one semester not over two terms but over one term and likewise these are courses that require you to have two hours of teaching time per week either an hour of lecture and an hour of tutorial or a two-hour seminar depending upon the course. In addition you will write one dissertation for your masters and this is something that we expect you to do primarily from the third term into the end of the summer. The assessment for the courses vary but by and large what we have introduced now is for you to write book reviews for you to write reviews of articles for you to write essays and in some cases also to write presentations or blog pieces there are a few courses that ask you to write examples for each of this we will be giving you a lot of guidance so that you are able to do these assessments as best as you can. Dana you have a question regarding whether or not you can only take the half unit courses the 15 credit ones or whether you can take full 30 credit courses also as options yes you can take the full unit courses across two terms in consultation with whoever the course advisor is for example myself as well as your degree convener okay so that is possible for you to do that but we will be in consultation in order to help you choose the best courses for what you want to do any other questions on that on the selection of courses okay okay hello there how are you fine hi so yes so we basically will help you with the course selection but yes technically speaking you can substitute one full unit course for two half unit courses okay there are a lot of consultations that are available for you when you are getting ready to write your assignments including with the course tutor and with the teacher with the tutors for the lecturers for that course there is also resources available for you in terms of what is a good essay how to write a good essay and we also help you read academic material via that kind of assistance that we will give you we also give you considerable feedback on your assessments who teaches the courses all the courses are taught by a single lecturer or a team of lecturers most of these are permanent members of staff your tutorials will be held depending on the courses that you take by either the lecturer or by our teaching fellows who are all already holders of phd degrees or are about to become holders of phd degrees then you have some courses which are seminars or so-called interactive lecture and these will be also available to you to take okay so any questions on courses and things like that just ask me if you like or you can ask me later hello afeez please mute your mic is it possible to yes ibnu it is possible to view essays written by students of a previous year in fact for each of these courses on the course website we put a model essay from a previous year and we tell you how many marks that's that person got okay and that basically will help you figure out what we are looking for for an essay so when you go to the course site you will find that there is already you know that kind of a model essay for you to consult so that you can plan your writing well in advance okay all right what are the courses like how much reading per week as i said to you earlier most courses are multidisciplinary and they basically most of them will have some degree of social sciences as well as some degree of history we don't expect that you will have degrees in these subjects in yes that is correct you cannot ibnu you cannot look at those essays at the moment because you can't sign on to the websites those websites require you to have a so as email id in order for you to be able to enter those websites okay so no at the moment we don't have a provision to show you an an excellent essay but once you have a so as email id then we will be able to show you what an essay what a very good essay looks like ibu kun asks hello subir are there options can you just retype your question your question has disappeared from my screen hello ibnu can you hear me are there are more courses than required uh you can audit those courses you can't take those courses for credit if you wanted to take more courses than the ones you're required then there is a provision called auditing a course when you audit a course you can sit through the lectures but you're not required to do the assignments and also you are not required to in fact you cannot sit in the tutorials for those courses but you can and in fact many students do audit a range of courses within and outside the department okay that is very useful because as uh from your question i can gather that uh you are interested in courses which are more than the number of courses that you're looking to take so yes that is a provision that is available for you to audit these courses we would like you to not audit too many courses obviously because that will take time away from the courses that you're required to take but we expect that you're all coming in as mature adults and that you will be able to make that kind of a decision okay how many pages of readings do you have to do per course per week well these days we don't require you to take more than two or three readings per week in each week you will find that within your course website there is a list of required courses and then there's a list of recommended sorry required readings and a list of recommended readings so for the required readings for the course that's the material on which your assessments will be based the recommended readings are there if you wanted to pursue a topic further if you wanted to use those readings for writing your dissertation or if you wanted to bring them into your essay writing assignments for any particular course but you will not be examined on readings which are recommended you will only be examined on the readings which are required okay so there are many newspaper articles blogs videos that kind of material that lecturers will routinely circulate as and when you know these things become relevant for that particular course for example you know if I was teaching a course right now and we did not anticipate the coronavirus but somehow it is relevant to the topic then we will send you links to articles that we think might be useful for you to understand the world as it is changing during the academic year okay a common question that is asked by people is should you do some background reading before you come to SOAS and of course my first answer to that question is that we will take care of your learning for your degree when you come to SOAS however if you check our website over the summer that is when we put a list of recommended readings as background readings for students who like to come a little bit prepared and also we will send out a list of keywords or names of people that we would like to have you look at on the internet or in an encyclopedia so that you know you can do you can basically come prepared Ibnu has a very good question which is that under auditing we say that you need to take the permission of you know the convener of that course outside the department yes that is for two reasons one is that in some courses they might require some kind of technical equipment so for example if you're looking to audit a language course then obviously that would be a problem because they have only x number of you know learning stations for that particular language sometimes if the rooms are if there's if the rooms are already full of the students who are required to take a particular course then conveners may not allow you to audit but by and large auditing a course is not a problem students from other departments audit our courses and therefore students from our department are also expected to be able to audit courses in other departments so I hope that answers your question there Ibnu okay so how is our SOAS degree different from other development studies degrees quite likely you already have applied to SOAS as well as to some other departments across the UK or across the world and obviously you know I would like very much for you to join SOAS rather than some other place so I think I think it's important for me to tell you why the SOAS degree is a good degree for you to choose one is that you must have checked that we are among the world's top development studies department this year we have ranked at number six in the world last year we were ranked at number eight in the world some years ago we were ranked at number four in the world so these rankings keep on changing but I'm happy to say that we have consistently been among the top 10 departments in the world and our department is the highest rated department of any department within SOAS our main difference from most other development studies departments is that we have a highly critical approach to the study of international development and by critical what I mean is that we show you what is the mainstream agenda of development currently in the world we show you how this agenda has been created what works what does not work and the emphasis in our degree and all the other degrees in our department has to do with the study of power how does power at different levels affect the formation of development programs but also how it affects how development outcomes are achieved or not achieved sufficiently etc we also put a bit of emphasis in fact our main focus is an equal emphasis on the theory side of things but also on the evidence side of things okay something new that we have introduced this year and I think we are unique in doing that is what we call blended learning so for example we have a number of distance learning modules because we have just started a distance learning master's degree which will be available from the next okay Christina do you rather focus on qualitative and quantitative and even though your question is again that has disappeared from the screen so we do you know depending upon the course we have a lot of quantitative we don't have any course which is primarily a quantitative course though the political economy of development course and some of the optional courses depending on your choice you know will will basically you know go one way or another we primarily rely on on qualitative data and qualitative studies for most of the readings that we consider the course on political economy of development has more emphasis on quantitative on some topics our teaching staff does have a number of economists within them and some of the some of them are experts in quantitative approaches to international development in terms of when would you like to as Ibnu has asked when would you like to when is a good time to contact course the venus I take it that you you are talking about auditing a course and that is basically during the registration period in September you can write to a course convener in advance saying to them that you are an incoming student of masters in development studies and that you would basically like to have you know some experience of auditing that course so that you can do but actually auditing requires you to fill out a form that will require you to my signature as the convener of the degree as well as the signature of the person who is teaching that course so that you can't at the moment do remotely that you can only do in September there was a question there very briefly which I saw which was about distance learning modules as part of their you know as part of their blended so right now we have on offer six different okay here is Christina is it more practical or is it more theoretical I'll just come to that in one minute Christina let me answer the question about distance learning modules so from this year we have we are basically putting together six different distance learning modules these are critical insights in forced migration human and critical security studies partnership beyond borders which is I'm responsible for that one which is on NGO social movements and civil society then there's a course on the politics of gender and feminism and then there is understanding violence conflict and development so these are all courses courses and modules which are delivered online they can be accessed remotely at any time so in other words if you if there is a course that you want to take but there is some timing clash with another course that you're required to take you can do the distance learning version of that particular course so there are different web pages for each of these courses and if you write to us we can send you the names of these courses and the links to the web page but what we are asking what we're letting you know is that at the moment in addition to the courses which are taught via lectures and face-to-face interaction there are six courses that we are offering which can be done remotely via which are delivered online and you are more than welcome to take these courses to go to Christina's question earlier on about the emphasis is it more on theory versus is it more on practice both of them are part and parcel of our teaching there are some courses which are more hands-on and more practical and there are other courses which are more oriented in theory but there is no course which is entirely theory and there is no course which is entirely practice-based in each course you will find a different combination of you know both of these two dimensions one question that had popped up was if someone has come from an NGO background how is this course looking for them and let me tell you that a large number of incoming students every year are coming in from NGO backgrounds some of them are also coming in from public service or having been a bureaucrat in the country from which they're coming just as about close to half of the students are coming straight from their BA or a previous degree so your class will have a very nice mix of people who are coming from all of these different backgrounds one of our best students from this past year who got a dissertation who got a distinction and was the highest marks on had the highest marks on graduation came from an NGO and organizing background he was involved in the organization of small-scale fishing populations in Africa and in Asia and he was also the best student of last year so coming from an NGO background we see that as a very good thing and we see that as you know preparing you very well and in fact many of you will have been admitted to our degree partly on the basis of having come from an NGO background even though your academic background may not have been in the social sciences does that answer your question there okay now which even which courses are you looking for in terms of you know auditing within economics or do you want to take them for credit so it depends there are courses that our students take regularly from that courses in econometrics sometimes tend to be difficult for people to audit because they require a continuous amount of assessment so if you want to take that for credit then you let us know and we will put you in touch with the course convener in the economics department you know who will be able to help you with that another question which had quickly popped up was on what kind of opportunities are there for you to exercise leadership or to build up strategic alliances and that's a very good question there is a set of weekly sessions in which leaders from the development sector sometimes our own ex-students who are now in leadership position within development organizations will come and they will basically do presentations for our current students for example for you people for next year so there is that issue where you can actually interact directly with people who are in leadership positions within the development sector in terms of strategic partnerships there are two or three different ways in which we do that one is that there will be again workshops on building strategic partnerships in which we bring alumni or senior figures within the development sector second there is a very active SOAS development studies Facebook page in which is called so as old and new and within that what you will find is that there are okay I see your question on advanced microeconomics and I'll come back to that in just a second so basically what we're looking for you know in in these you know through the SOAS old and new website is that we connect our alumni who are now already in positions of middle or senior management in international development with incoming students or people who have just passed on so there's a fair bit of interaction and support if you were to go to that web page you on off on that Facebook page what you can see is that there are postings for jobs which are first announced to the students of SOAS by our alumni and there are also interactions that take place there also your as I said your classroom and your incoming year will be about 150 odd students so a lot of partnerships are fostered and made during the course of your masters itself so even if you want to take a course in advanced microeconomics please get in touch with me and I shall put you in touch with the convener for that course or the office will put you in yes we do have SOAS Commonwealth Shared Scholarship candidates in fact we have just looked at the applications first round of that and we are in the process of looking at applications for other you know awards which are administered via the British Academy so yes there are those kinds of scholarship opportunities available okay so does that answer the question on leadership and strategic partnerships no Ibokun these are the Commonwealth ones yes some of them have been if you applied where are you from Ibokun can I ask you because in Nigeria and have you already was there a form that was available for you to specify okay so you have not heard back you will probably hear back Ibokun in the next few days because our university was closed as a result of a strike so you should be able to hear that information in this week whether or not you have been nominated for that prize okay as far as I'm aware you know the internal assessment of Commonwealth Award applicants from Nigeria and Ghana has already happened and you will soon hear from the scholarships yep a feast as well you will hear about this from the scholarships office we have given them our assessment those applications so you know because we are slightly delayed due to strikes as was the entire British higher education system you should be in a position to hear about that in the next few days and if not then please get in touch with me and you know I'll see what kind of information I can pass on to you yes Hafiz can you just remind me of your previous question because there are several of them passing you know popping up at the same time do we have courses that touch upon international education there are courses that have components of in on international education as of now there isn't a full module on international education so there are courses on that and then of course next door to us is the Institute for Institute of Education which is a part of the University of London and you know which is a part of University College London let me know for you what the current status is of our students being allowed to take courses within the Institute of Education so I would request you to you know just you know send me an email so that I can forward you more up-to-date information so you know something that people like to ask is how much emphasis does it have on research and teaching and again your question has come by and it has disappeared again so if you could just okay on research and teaching and learning about yes we have two courses on research methodologies there is in fact a master's there's something called the battlefield of methods and that is an optional where research methodology for development professionals is taught in many courses there is a small number of sessions which are devoted to research methodology but if someone was not taking the research methods course when you start working on your dissertation that has a very rigorous component of research methodology that is decided between you and your dissertation supervisor because obviously there's no general research methodology we will basically tailor a research methodology reading list for the kind of dissertation that you want to write so I hope that addresses your question okay people ask I mean you know how do you deal with issues that come up which become suddenly very important in international development but were not so important when students began that particular course and of course you know a very good example of something like this is the current coronavirus pandemic and I can guess number two we have a lot of focus on sub-saharan Africa in our MSc development studies and in fact I can say that something like one third of our teaching staff are active researchers in sub-saharan Africa and in fact many of them do a fair bit of consulting with your national governments or with NGOs which are active in sub-saharan Africa so just hold on regarding corona yes well you know if no we don't know whether the corona situation will affect we are hoping that you know because no one can give us a time frame so there are things which are being planned if this current round of the epidemic dies out by the end of the summer or sometime in the middle of the summer some people expect I hope that it'll get over in the next two months then things will happen as normal if it turns out that this lasts for much longer then the university and all universities in the UK are currently as we speak sitting and planning about what to do for example delay the time of intake Christina can you imagine to have the totally online session we are in the process of putting together a complete masters which will be an online masters and if it is if it is the course that COVID-19 you know continues then that is a very much an option on the table Steve Stephanie if you're asking for a recording then you will basically have to contact yes there is an entirely a hundred percent international MSc available and that is not the masters about which I'm talking okay so I mean you know for for the entirely hundred percent masters obviously not all the courses that we have at SOAS at the moment are online so the range of options that you have for the entirely hundred percent masters online masters is not the same as an on-campus masters which is why we have the blended learning option for you in the sense that at that point you will at this point you will be able to take some of those courses but that's a different masters and that is not the masters about which I'm talking today okay so for example something like the corona thing we already have incorporated that in our teaching in my lecture online lecture for this week we approach it in two different ways we looked at the interconnections between international food production the kind of states and governments that different countries have and the global economy of travel to try to figure out both the spread of this pandemic as well as we looked at the strategies undertaken by different kinds of government for example authoritarian government populist governments liberal democracy social democracy etc to look at how each one of them has been able how each one of them has approached the problem and the degrees of success they have had so far in terms of being able to control its spread or or not so to the extent possible we try to incorporate events such as that into our teaching okay any questions on that okay so for example you know we are looking right now at you know different kinds of governments and for example in the case of China we are looking at the extent to which a very strong state in China which initially you know was looking to suppress information about that was then able to put pressure on its population particularly with its social isolation policies we look at South Korea for example where compulsory military service we speculated had some impact on the high degrees of rule observation of observing rules such that you know Korea has been able to have some amount of control over the spread of the disease within their country we also briefly looked at USA, Brazil and India in which we argued that in both in all of these countries you have a kind of very strong populist leader and the degree of trust that people have had in the leader has been a substitute for civic participation as well as the transparency of information in these countries so because this is all very new and the situation is unfolding we basically only pose these as questions we also looked at social democratic countries like Denmark where for example government and industry and unions have worked together to provide wage compensation to workers to prevent massive layoffs as well as to you know kind of give people reassurance that their basic necessities will be taken care of by the government yes that is true that is my Ibokun Afiz etc that is my email address ss61 at soas.ac.uk and yes you can obviously send me follow-up questions that relate to the degree or anything I might have said job prospects now you know the global job market is what it is what we can tell you is that most of our students are able to well they basically move on to so as and they go get jobs within prominent NGOs and think tanks they work with national governments or regional and international agencies many of them go to journalism and media careers and then quite a number of them get further degrees like a PhD so that's the kind of overall profile of our student and it again depends on country so for example annually we'll get a lot of Pakistani bureaucrats who will then go back to work as bureaucrats in Pakistan that will also be the case with a number of you know African students from Ghana and from Nigeria many students who come they write about their career plans because you have to write about in your scholarship applications if you're applying for a scholarship about your service to your nation on your return so then they go back to their countries and they try to contribute within development in those countries okay what else can I tell you what is the best way to get the most out of your degree obviously we have an attendance policy within you know lectures but especially within tutorials we require you to attend tutorials in order for you to be able to pass a particular course low attendance in tutorials is not good for your academic performance we require you to be able to do your readings every week because you don't want to be left behind if there is a doubt that you have regarding any reading then you know what you would like you to do is to come and see us in our office hours the lectures or the tutors so as has many seminars on a weekly basis sometimes far too many seminars from five o'clock onwards on many different issues where we bring scholars from around the world or specialists and experts from around the world do attend as many of those as you can interact with the speakers that is another good way for networking of course London is a great city for international students it has a lot for you to a lot to offer and we have the LC closed by the University College London closed by their students come regularly to our seminars and we also encourage our students to go to their seminars does so has have any options to learn about social entrepreneurship and to set up NGOs on their own so we have an optional course which is called development practice and associated with development practice is a year-long seminar series which is called professional practice so these are the two platforms in which development entrepreneurship how NGOs work practicalities of doing development those things are basically you know covered within those two courses or the course and the seminar series really so then we'll have workshops but otherwise is if if you're asking me if there is an optional module beyond development and beyond professional practice then we do not have one that will allow you to learn how to set up a social enterprise in its own right okay okay now I'm open to questions now so do ask me questions that you would like to because I've basically done I'm done with whatever I needed to cover in my presentation for you and now we have a 15 minutes remaining for any questions that you might have for me no you're not too late Genia for asking for applying to the so as masters in development studies your question has again disappeared so if you could just put that back up there I can look at the second part of your question relationship between schools okay and the second one um well you know the you know these were see I mean some until about 10 years ago there was one composite University of London and within the composite University of London you had different units some of them were called college like King's College University College etc some of them were called institutes like the Institute for Commonwealth Studies the Institute for Education and some of them called school the London School of Economics School of Oriental and African Studies School of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies so these were basically names from a previous era and these are the names by which our institutions became known across the world so we did not want to change our name from school of Oriental and African Studies and that is why you have different names across different units of the X University of London some of which are called college some of which are called institutes some of which are called school I hope that answers that question social events yes many many social events all the time so for example okay let me so as new and old try so as old and new you should be able to find it I've only joined it myself in the last few days so it does exist over there the social events at so as so there will be net you know as you come in there will be several receptions that will happen before classes begin then each term there are social events organized by the department in which students and staff can mingle so that so you know for each term there'll be one of those sessions then I mean what what kind of social event are you looking for can you please be a bit more specific because a lot of these things will be organized by student societies and by the students union as well but the department itself will hold three to four of these social events in which we have informal interactions between students and staff level of readiness Dana you know as I said many of you will be coming straight from the university yes that's the one young and old sorry not old and new young and old you you're more accurate a book than me but basically what we're looking at is that you know we will have you know these different kinds of interactions and the degree of preparedness of preparedness for someone to come here because of you will not be coming straight from university is that you should have a firm grip on international events as they as they relate to the developing world today so you know we would like you to be aware of what is going on in the world we would like you to have some you know high school level knowledge of world history so because you know a lot of yeah okay the questions are coming thick and fast so I'll try and see how many of these I can answer so you know what we'd like you to do is to have a fair degree of familiarity with you know world history for example if we said the Spanish colonization of Latin America you should have some working knowledge of that if we talk about the anti-colonial struggles of Asia and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s then you should be aware that these were countries that went through an anti-colonial struggle if we say something along the lines of you know the Maoist revolution in China then you should know that this is you know something that happened which was of tremendous importance and so on so that is the kind of degree of familiarity that we would like to you know expect from you because then it makes our job of delivering the one hour lecture much easier one question that just popped up was regarding part-time students so you know the structure of the course of course is the same except that you'll be doing it over two years and not over one year so for part-time students it is you know the first year is your two cold courses and the second year is your four of the dissertation and within that what we expect you to do is to be at so as for two days of the week at the minimum okay so what we will do is to prioritize you in terms of enrolling you in the tutorial groups so that you don't have to come on a third day you're obviously welcome to come back to come on a third day but we try to consolidate your required presence on campus to two days of the week that is our aim okay is there a question I did not answer because so many came can you change from full-time to part-time yes you can it is normally you know I mean people who are coming from abroad you need to take a look at what your visa will allow you to do but if you are coming in from you know home or EU student then of course you know after Brexit that is a bit of uncertainty but if you're a student from within Britain you can come in as a part as a full-time student and transition on to a part-time it will require a kind of an application process but we have not had a problem specific skills understanding fiscal space advocacy yes yes I mean these okay so your specific skills will be of two different ways you know one can think of that in two different ways because we will be reading a bunch of government documents and international agency documents in our required readings and recommended readings yes of course there will be a deep degree of familiarity that you will develop with the kind of international development lingo if you want to call it that and that also includes the kind of evolving set of jargon or development speak that is current within the development sector at that point in time so yes you know you will be able to familiarize yourself and to get on top of that kind of thing analytical reasoning will be another skill and the understanding as you said of the fiscal landscape there are particular courses which are on issues of financialization for example and that is also you know a theme in many different courses that we follow so if you are looking at aspects of finance as they are connected to contemporary international development then in many courses that particular aspect will be touched upon and in some courses more in depth than in others okay send me any more questions that you have most of your application is it your supporting statement you know jenior yes it is your supporting statement and you know if you're getting please tell your referees to write about your particular strengths we need we like quite a lot on the reference letters that we get for that support your application so for example someone might write in your favor he or she is a very good candidate and as happens he or she is a very nice person etc but if they could just write a few lines on exactly what makes you a suitable student for an MSc in so as that helps us quite a lot so you know apart from your personal statement we assume that you've seen the entry criteria with respect to marks we are somewhat flexible with respect to that if if your work experience can't cover for you not meeting the you know require the marks requirement to view previous students work essays book reviews yes there is as I said at the beginning of the session for each course we do have on the course websites model book reviews and essays from a previous year so that you're able to see what kind of written assignments is given high marks these are not required for you to follow but these will give you a good idea as to what someone did in a previous year for which they were given a high distinction poverty is both an option in its own right Dana for example the so-called course on the working poor but poverty is very much at the center of each and every course within the department that I can think of courses on gender will probably also have weeks on poverty my course on social movements and civil society or is you know has several weeks on the politics of poor people theory policy and practice your required course has a week on poverty and poverty is a poverty alleviation is a theme indices of poverty and calculations of poverty is a key element of political economy of development so yes poverty is one of the central themes that you can find across the core courses and in many if not most of the options okay statistical software and academic or professional no we don't have any particular preference and Zhenya just hang on to your question no we don't have any particular preference for the kind of statistical package that you might use there might be that you know particular courses you know have their own but since my own work is not at all statistical I would not be able to answer your question on that but you might want to have you know send me that question as an email okay two questions that had just popped up can I just have you put them back back up again please referees guide this applicants yes that is correct you can put up to two referees some people even put three but we basically like if if you're out of the university setup for quite a while and therefore it is awkward for you to go back to your old university lecturer or professors to ask them for a letter then you can obviously go for a professional letter or someone who knows you prefer even in that case what I would like to emphasize is that the person should not only write about your professional skills to some extent they should write about your understanding of development issues whether you have you know what kind of analytical mind you have because those are helpful to us in making our decisions to offer you admission if I'm to hand my application the next two weeks when would I hear I try to because your applications will come to me and I'd like to answer back to the admissions office on the day that I get the applications if sometimes the emails come with eight or ten different applications I might take a few days extra but otherwise we have a very rapid turnaround on applications uh Christina when are the exams held you say so at the moment uh you know we we are basically you know any courses will not have an exam in fact at the moment very few courses have an exam so if you're taking a course which has which is over two units let us say theory policy and practice of development the structure right now which is a required course the structure right now is that your first assignment is due in week six in which is in term one your second assignment is due around week number 13 which is in term two and then you are given a take home essay questions for which your answers are due basically around April this year everything has been disrupted by the coronavirus but you will basically not be sitting in an exam hall or taking an exam in courses where exams are to be held those exams are basically held between the end of May and the beginning of June so and the beginning of July so that is your exam period but as I said these days there are very very few courses that still have an exam okay good to talk to all of you and good luck uh yes dana yes that is correct you can take a look at previous topics okay I look forward to all of you and please do stay safe in this situation of pandemic you know then you know so that we can all see each other in September and yes imnu we will help you with your dissertation topic and your research methodologies depending upon the pick that you choose all right good bye see you later bye bye afeez