 So my name is Ellen and you begin I specialise in the history of modern South Asia but I'm also the convener of our two MA history programs here in the so as history department and I thought I'd open this webinar session by talking you through our programs introducing you to so as explaining what we do and talking you through the two really the sort of the two to four different program options we run here after that I'll be taking questions and if you put your questions through on the chat function I can answer those through speech and hopefully answer all the questions that you have. So just to sort of talk you through what we offer you here so as at the level of so as itself so as is internationally renowned for its research and teaching in in in the regions of Asia Africa and the Middle East we offer well over 100 graduate programs we are traditionally we were set up over 100 years ago as a graduate level studies institution which means that rather than whereas most universities in the UK have started at undergraduate level and added on their graduate studies we are initially from the from the beginning so as there's been a graduate level institution which is added on undergraduate studies what this really means is that as a graduate students as you are at the heart of what we do and I think all of our students agree that rather than being a second-class citizen as can happen in some institutions graduate students at so as are very much the core of our community and are involved in all the different aspects of life here we offer 100 graduate programs but also a lot of capacity for you to build a program an MA program that suits your particular interests we offer a core course in in history but we also allow you to choose either a year long or two term long open open subjects in other disciplines we also have an unparalleled range of non-European languages that you can learn here either as part of your degree or as an option running alongside your degree we strongly encourage you to take that up and and you'll find that lots of our your tutors here will really kind of help you help you to navigate that and encourage you with that we also have an incredible library very much seen as one of you we're one of the UK's national research libraries people come from all over the world to come and work here so we really do offer international internationally renowned levels of resources here to help you with your studies so that's so as to talk a little bit more about what studying history at so as looks like we are the only history department in Britain and I think I think in Europe more generally to have a history department that is focused exclusively on the regions of Asia Africa in the Middle East our courses are heavily focused around discipline we will teach you historical method you will learn through our core course in the MA program you'll have a very deep learning of the debates that have made the subject of history as it is today but our courses are also designed specifically to look at history of these specific regions of the world so history itself is a discipline that emerged very much from the European Enlightenment and and our courses are set up to help you to critique the subject of history itself so you will study the history of the regions that that we focus on here but we'll also ask you to think about what history looks like from those regions so what does the subject and the institutions and the resources that we use to look at to study history what do those are like how can you engage with them from from a non-European perspective or you know how can we critique the discipline of history not just simply accept it as the definitive way of looking at the past we offer a very good teacher-staff ratio our class sizes are typically we run the history department in Dennis to run most of his teaching through seminar level teaching which means that we have small classes give it a cat class as an absolute maximum of 20 and to run them at a smaller level than that wherever we can the other thing that makes us unique is that we teach about the areas and the subjects that we research so there's a great deal of passion in what we teach and it means that you get cutting-edge classes really based around new research and based around the stuff that we're most interested in and you know what we want to do with our classes is to get you excited and interested in that too to talk a little bit more also about our student cohort it isn't all about us and our passions and the subjects that we like to teach we're also very interested in you we have a very diverse student cohort at MA level which is a challenge but also an exciting part of teaching at the MA level people come to us straight from their BA's they come from us come to us from BA whether they haven't studied any non-European or american history before or they come to us from from area studies BA's people also come to us after working you know having finished their BA some time ago working either in the UK or more internationally and a lot of students come to us from outside the UK and Europe more generally so our student body is very diverse you will have a networking experience I mean you will learn from us but you will also learn from your peers and we know that a lot of our students stay in touch with with the people that they meet at SOAS and continue to work together and communicate together long after they've left us we recognize the different reasons why people are coming to SOAS to study an MA some people will be looking for an academic career path but many others don't and we seek to build that into our courses our courses are designed quite thematically to give you a sound foundation on which to build your knowledge but also to allow you to take those themes up in ways that interest you specifically so while you can tailor make your program you can also choose areas of interest within each of the courses that you study with us and and really develop your interests wherever they lie we'll also work with you particularly around your dissertation which is a piece of work that can lead you to multiple destinations either to an academic one in terms of building on work for a PhD or for a for a non-academic career path where you can you can do research and collect information you might be using you might use your research skills that you're using for the dissertation to work for policy teams to to do many other kind of research based work outside of academia the facts that we have a student a diverse student body means that we also the the trajectory the parts that they follow after studying with us are also pretty diverse many students do go on to study for PhDs do carry on with the academic career path but lots don't those that don't go on to do PhDs go move into a kind of wide variety of career options certainly a lot of students go off and join charity organizations and NGOs but other people come to study with us in order to go on to careers that make a lot more money than that where you you don't just have to be kind of right on charity worker to study it so as at the bottom of the slides that I hope you can see at the moment I've just given some details of students who studied with us recently Alison was working at Deloitte came and did her MA here in the middle of that and following her MA went on to take up a cultural internship at the Royal Historical Palaces which led her to go on to do research at the V&A which had led led her to take take up that career at the PhD path and she's now working at UCL while continuing her teaching fellowship at the V&A Dewey left left so else to go back to to Indonesia where she was working previously she joined a right activist group which and is now working at the University of Indonesia Rob did his MA with Alison is now working at the BBC and we do have a lot of students go on to to take up careers in journalism both in Britain and more internationally so your MA can take you to multiple destinations as kind of people that you study with here and that you meet with while you're studying here great so that's a bit of the background of so as and of the programs that we offer I want now to to really talk you through the the different programs that that that we can provide here we really have two MA programs we have the straight MA history and we also have the MA historical research methods with both of those programs you have the option to take the program with an intensive language setup which I'll talk you through separately so we have four programs if you include the intensive language setup but they operate around two different ideas of kind of the MA history core so let's start with our main MA history program we have the MA history and we also have the MA history with pathway option I think this produces quite a lot of confusion from people who've written to me the pathway option the default system with this is that you will get an MA history degree we have the pathway option which allows you to connect your history your MA history degree to a particular region the pathway is designed for students particularly for students who want to emphasize a regional specialty so for students who want to go on and do a PhD in a particular area studies program they want to show that they have an MA history but with a focus on that particular region or for people who have a very regionally focused research future ahead of them so there's absolutely no obligation to select the pathway the pathway is an option should you need it for whatever you want to use the MA history program to do um so the MA history program is set up in the following way we have 100 it's comprised of 180 credits 60 credits of this comes through our through the dissertation that you will write over the summer period the 10000 my dissertation and 120 credits are made up through talk courses the 120 credits of talk courses are divided up in the following ways you have to do our core course so you'll do our core course as a cohort and the course debating paths and crafting histories this is our methodology course designed to give you a really kind of deep level understanding of historical methodology and the debates that are relevant for studying history in the regions that we're focused in so it is an introduction to archival work to research work but also helping you to see how the regions and the themes that you might be interested in have been looked at broadly and specifically around the the regions that you're studying so you'll look at different kinds of archives you'll also look at debates around political theory gender in history um global history military history imperial history um so so this is yeah it's it's a very um well established and um focus method historically of course focused on historical methodology but specifically for the history of Asia Africa and Middle East alongside your core course you need to do 90 credits of other talk courses all of the courses that we teach within the history department that are on our website are described as list a courses all of these are 15 credit courses that run for one term only we've standardized all of our courses these are assessed only through coursework we don't have exams um and coursework usually typically two pieces of coursework um written over the space of a 10-week term period including with some extra time around breaks um you need to take 60 credits from our list a courses so 60 credits of history courses which means four different courses that we offer within the history department um you can then take up to 30 credits of open auctions so 30 credits of courses from other departments many other departments have also opted for the term long 15 credit courses like us but there are also a couple of year-long 30 credit courses so you can effectively do two one or two um courses from outside the history department if you want to do the MA history with pathway you need to take 45 credits of history courses you need to take three history courses alongside your core course um three history courses from the particular region you wish to specialise in but otherwise if you just want to do the straightforward MA history course you need to take your 60 credits your four courses and they can be from any region so you'll use term one and term two while you're studying it so as to do your core course and to do your your your your your chosen taught course modules so effectively you're studying your core course throughout the year um and then you are also studying three courses each term um if you're going to work on the terminal model um at the end of the second term you'll need to submit a dissertation plan which will help you with throughout the year that identifies the area that you want to work on in your dissertation the sources that you're going to use and the supervisor you're going to work with that will form the basis of the 10 000 my dissertation which you write over the course of your of the summer you'll see on the slide that it says a 10 000 my dissertation linked to the major course um we actually don't talk about major and minor courses anymore although some departments so as do um the idea of linking the dissertation to one of the courses you've studied is not to restrict your options but rather to make sure that you are writing about something that you have a strong grounding in then you're going to have um you effectively have three and a half months to write your dissertation which I think feels like quite a long time at the beginning of the degree but goes very quickly so we find that students do much better if they are able to start work on a dissertation that they on a topic that they have some understanding of it also by linking the dissertation to a course it also means that you've got a clear uh someone who you can work with who is who is expert in that field and can guide you properly with with with your dissertation work so the connection to a course is very much intended to help you and support you rather than to restrict you if you have a topic that you want to work on that doesn't link directly to a course will will pay you up with someone who is best able to supervise you we'd encourage you to use what you have learned in the courses that you've studied with us to build towards that topic so there's definitely that kind of leeway but we do ask that by the end of the second term you have a clear idea of what your dissertation is going to be on that we can set you up for support and guidance appropriately I've got a list of the courses that are running next year at the end of this power point and and I'll talk you through those but this is a very broad range we do have comparative and global courses although I think that these aren't running next year because of leave arrangements with members of staff but there's certainly scope again we encourage you strongly to think comparatively across the courses you're studying there's also the option to to do a language either as part of your credits open option or or alongside the degree sort of on the side through through our evening studies class here at SOAS so our intensive language programs are a two-year MA a two-year MA program effectively a sort of double MA stretched over over two years that allows you to do all the components of the MA history alongside added credits in intensive language learning while we teach a broad range of languages at SOAS we have this intensive language program set up with only three languages at the moment Japanese Korean and Arabic this is because the intensive language program involves a summer study abroad period where you work in an internationally renowned university in in one of the in the country the language that you're studying I think you're based in in Tokyo if you study Japanese you're based in Seoul if you study Korean and I think you're based in Jordan if you do the Arabic intensive language program all the intensive language classes and study abroad period are managed by my colleagues in the language department they're not managed by history specialists we provide the the kind of the history discipline element of this program but you're in the very capable hands of my colleagues in the in the language department who have been running these study abroad sessions and these language learning sessions for four years it's a very well established program so the MA history and intensive language program is a 315 credit MA program which includes the 120 taught the 120 credits of the taught courses that I showed you with the in the last slide of the MA history program but sorry I should expand this fully but with the intensive language courses added in around that and the way in which this is divided is that you study 60 credits of your history program in the first year so typically you do the core course and two term long courses alongside doing 60 credits of your intensive language teaching and when I say intensive I mean intensive and I mean pretty intense students who are studying these these courses typically have language classes on four out of every five working days sometimes I think the Arabic program is even more intensive than that and the idea here is to really in many ways students focus on the language in the first year of these programs to really build a basis in that language to really get that established they then have the 45 credit study abroad in the summer come back to so as where they do the remainder of their their taught history courses so the other the 60 credits of the taught courses either four more history courses or two more history courses with their open options and then they have slightly fewer hours of language learning in that second year on the basis that the language has been established through the first year in the summer study period at the end of the fourth term then students write their 60 credit dissertation following exactly the same setup as as the straight in the history program all of these intensive language programs are open to students from any language ability you don't need to know any Japanese Korean or Arabic beforehand equally if you do know these languages you're very welcome to join the program at the beginning of your first term at SOAS there's a number of placing exams that put you into classes based on your ability to take you through at that level these classes are taught alongside the BA language learning language programs that SOAS offers so it's not just an MA history class for your language classes but all the students that are studying these programs at the moment say that that's been a really nice way to get to know more people and certainly to build networks of people interested in the same kinds of areas that they're studying and it also gives you a way to meet people who are not necessarily history students which well you know clearly you're coming to meet other history students that can be a good thing too so this has overlapped with our straight MA history course but is is an MA course for people who already have a clear idea of a history research project who have a clear history research project in mind it has been developed particularly for students who who really want to do an MA as a sort of stepping stone to a clear PhD program they have a PhD program in mind perhaps but that said we also have students who have done this program who don't necessarily want to go on and do a PhD but do have a very clear project in mind for their career path and want to use this MA program to follow that up so the the the division of of taught courses and to the dissertation is exactly the same as with our MA history program you have 120 taught courses you have the 10,000 wide 60 credit dissertation that you do in the summer period after term two but you have two core compulsory courses one is core one is compulsory but effectively it's the same thing so you do our debating past crafting histories core course the methodology training course alongside the MA history cohort but you also have to do a research training course on a dissertation project a research project design course so this core course is effectively a mini PhD you are set up with one-to-one supervision with a member of staff in the department who who is expert in the area of interest that you have and you meet for we sort of say typically about eight hours of supervision over the course of the year to talk through your project and to devise two essays two five thousand word essays so the the general practice is to write one essay in each of the terms often typically one essay will look at the question of sources around the project that you're interested in another might take a question of methodology and the idea is that these two long essays help you to improve and set up your PhD sorry your dissertation proposal that you then write over the summer we do ask all applicants for this course to submit a research proposal this isn't anything as like a sort of detailed proposal as you need for a PhD program but we want to see that you've pinpointed a specific time period a specific set of historical questions you've thought about how you're going to work on that so particularly kind of what sources you're interested in using you've got some basis from which you can then begin to design the essays that you write for the research design course so this is more of an independent research MA and we do require you to have a clear idea of what you're interested in but we will work with you carefully to help you sculpt two two essays that will that work as building blocks for the dissertation that you write at the end of the program you then of course still have 60 credits to cover through your taught classes this can be through four of the taught options on the the list a on the on the history list of courses it could be two history courses and and 30 credits open option you can choose those as as suit you so that yeah as I say that this is you build you build the scope in here to build the MA program that best suits your interests you can also do the MA historical search methods program with an intensive language option so that works in the same basis as the the the MA history and intensive language program again it's you this this program works only with Japanese Korean and Arabic you will do 60 credits of taught language in the first year alongside typically the debating past the compulsory course and the research design course your course you'll have your summer period away your 45 credits summer period away and then come back and do the remainder of your taught courses alongside 30 credits of language learning in your second year to get ready to write your your dissertation so the breakdown of history courses to language courses is the same for the MA historical methods with intensive language but obviously the course the history courses that you choose with the MA historical methods and intensive language follows this follows the breakdown on this slide rather than the MA history slide the final thing I want to show you is the list of courses that we are running next year we like many universities at the moment we have to work within the constraints of research funding programs which means that all not all colleagues are being encouraged to find find funding for to pursue their own research which often takes them out of the teaching calendar for a year we endeavor to run as many courses as we can with expert teaching as many courses with expert teaching as we can but the the funding structure and sabbatical structure does limit what we can it does does affect quite which courses we can run on on a yearly basis we recognize that that has a big impact on our MA because if you're only here to study for a year you you you really you know your your course choices are somewhat dictated by members of staff who are available to teach that year I should add that all of the MA history programs I've taught you through are available on a part-time option so you can study them over a two-year period and even a four-year period if you want to do the intensive language options so if you're going to do a part-time MA history and intensive language that summer period away can't be done part-time you have to do one summer block away the part-time courses are literally a division in half so rather than doing rather than doing four courses over each term or your core course and and six taught options over two terms you'll do your core course and two taught options in the first year and then so you do your core course that runs through term one and term two you do one sort of option in term one and that one sort of option in term two alongside the core course and then in your second year you would do two taught options in the first term and two options in the second year so it's literally a sort of a split of the ours in the classes across the two years if you're taking these courses part-time. The advantage of doing the part-time courses that you will are likely to get slightly different range of course options offered for the years that you're studying with us. I hope that that's clear. If not, please do ask me questions in the question and ask the session that will follow shortly and I'll try to explain that slightly better. But so if you come to study with us next year from next September, 2018, these are the courses that we'll be running over that academic year. I would flag that the one area that we're not able to cover in depth with our only teaching next year is our South East Asian area options. If you are interested in coming to study a South East Asian history in particular, please do drop me a line and consider if you can, applying in 2019 to 2021. I very much hope that we will be able to run those courses, they do exist. It's just around teaching availability for next year. You can see from the titles here that these courses are framed in fairly general terms. So if I take, give you the example of my MA history course, which is gender law and the family in the history of mine in South Asia, the fourth one down on the list of options. This course runs from the establishment from sort of the 17th century, the very early days of company presence in South Asia through to post-liberalization in India. So we cover different chronological ranges and different themes and topics each week. And I have students writing on vulgar ideas of gender through to discussions of monsoon with Gabi Gushy Gabi Khan. So the course is designed to appeal to a very broad range of interests of people who are interested in gender law and the family and lots of the people who take that option are as many people who are interested in the kind of more historical period of South Asian history. There's also lots of people who are interested in the post-colonial or much more contemporary period of South Asian history. So, and these courses are all arranged slightly differently but they're all designed to sort of be taught somewhat thematically to help you find something that is of interest to you, to cater to a broad range of interests. Okay, that's the end of the presentation that I have for you. I will just show you my email address in case you want to get in touch. I'll show that to you now there. So that's en2atsoas.ac.uk. If you've got any questions, do please drop me a line. But I'm now going to take questions from the chat feed. So Drithi is studying in India and is pursuing a three year long undergraduate degree in comparative literature rather than history. And as I understand your question, Drithi, the question is whether doing a comparative literature degree is enough to mean you can gain admittance to the MA history program or whether or not you'd need to do another degree or kind of something more historical in focus before you could be eligible for the program. I think that's what I'm understanding from your question. No, you would absolutely be able to apply straight from your comparative literature degree. What we would ask you to do is to use your application statement to talk about how you feel your degree so far has prepared you for the kind of MA history program that we teach here. Why have you decided to now study a more historical course like the one that we offer? And what would you like to do with it? How would you use the skills that you have so far to kind of excel in this course here? We, in many ways, our firmer requirement is that you have a two one or international equivalent undergraduate degree because that suggests an ability to deal with sort of the stamina, I guess, of an MA program. But we are very much open to students from a range of backgrounds. I would say that this year we've admitted students from a science background, from a performing arts background, all of whom wrote quite specific statements explaining why they were now interested in history and in history of the regions that we teach. We do consider every application on an individual basis. So please do use that statement to explain exactly why you want to come study with us. But that's absolutely not doing history. It's absolutely not a hindrance to admittance at all and we would encourage you to apply if you're interested. Ruthie's also asked about internship for international students. We don't offer formal internships as part of the MA history program. We have begun working on this but it became such a complicated piece of work for us to manage. Informally, members of staff may be able to give you information to help you set up internships for international students. There's also questions of visa and visa status which I don't know enough about. I'm afraid what I would suggest though, if you've got any questions about visas, please do write to my colleagues in admissions and their email addresses, master's admissions or one word at soas.ac.uk or you can find their details on the website. So my next question is from Anne Luens about part-time study. So if you study part-time, is there a rule about how many credits you can take each year? Are you expected to choose 90 credits per year exactly? So in fact, it's not 90 credits per year, no, because 60 credits of that is the dissertation which will be done, has to be done over a summer. I mean, if you're studying part-time, you can work on the dissertation for two years. We'd encourage you to do that. But you would need to divide the 120 credits of taught courses over the two years. We strongly recommend a fairly even division of that. So to have 60 credits in one year, 60 credits in the other, usually again, we recommend that you do the methodology course in the first year and two tour options alongside that and then four options in your second year of part-time study. I think that there is probably scope to adapt that if need be. If that was, if you needed to, we could, if you could explain that's your situation to us and we could sort of try and work out for you. I can't offer any guarantees, but we'd certainly be keen to help you as far as possible. But the standard arrangement is usually that sort of 60 credit of taught courses in year one, 60 credits of taught courses in year two. I would also, it might well be worth flagging that the credit framework system that we use here assumes that one credit is equal to about 10 hours of work. So a 15 credit course is equal to 150 hours of work. Having sat down and sort of worked out the maths of this over a two-term structure, the credit system anticipates something like 60 hours of work a week. It's a pretty big workload. And that workload includes everything, reading for your class, we need to think about kind of getting access to that material. But an MA history course is a large workload and I would stress that people have asked if they can do the MA history alongside full-time work. My answer would be no, we expect presence in classes. This isn't a distance learning program. You need to be able to attend classes in person and you really need to have the space in your calendar to take on quite serious levels of research work if you really want to get the most out of the MA history which obviously is a time commitment and a financial commitment. So we would encourage you to think about the hours that you need to set aside for it. So I hope that answers your question somewhat, Anne. So Akane from Japan. So there's a number of questions here. Let me start. So the first question from Akane is about when the department decides on an instructor for dissertation writing. So that's a great question. We don't decide who you're gonna work with for your dissertation, you have to do that. The whole point of the dissertation module is for you to gain experience of designing, setting up and then executing a research project all on your own. You need to set up the research questions that you're interested in looking at. Think about how you're gonna research the project and then think about how you're gonna write it. So the point is that you choose your dissertation supervisor. As I said earlier on, we encourage you to think about building your dissertation project around your talk courses. So it may well be if you've got a course that's very interesting to you that becomes the basis of your thought for your dissertation, you may well want to work with the tutor of that course to work on for your dissertation. And then you'll have meetings with that tutor to work out your research plan to devise your dissertation plan over the terms one and two. And then a couple of meetings at the beginning of the summer period with them to set you up on your MA work, which you'll do over the summer. I also, as an MA convener, I ran a series of workshops in that first term really helping you to devise the project, giving you the milestones that you need to build a research project. So we will absolutely help you to build a research project. We'll explain what you need to do, but the choice is yours about what you do with it and who you work with on it. So the second question then is how often will you see the instructor? Well, this is also a great question and is an incentive for you to start thinking about your dissertation from the beginning of the course. We are available in the terms that we're teaching, we're very available. The summer period when you're writing your dissertation is also the period when members of the staff are writing their research work too. So all of your dissertation supervisors will be available throughout the terms and we'll set up a series of meetings with you at the end of the second term. So I normally endeavour to hold three one-hour meetings with my MA students at the end of the second term. And then I'm available on email through the summer, but the expectation is that students will be well enough established by that point to do the research themselves. So I'm working with six students this year on their MA dissertations and we've met throughout terms one and two and I'm just about to hold my second and third hour long meeting with them to help formulate their project. So you do need to keep in mind that your supervisor is going to be doing their own research work over the summer, but they do, there's a commitment from us to meet with you for a substantial period for around three hours to set up the project, three hours and then email availability to set up the project in the first instance. So the third question is, how many students will be included in the dissertation writing class in most cases? So we don't run dissertation writing classes specifically. We do have a language, there's a specific writing workshop department or so as that runs a writing workshop, research skills workshops through the years. We'll give you information about that, help to set you up for that. I run three two-hour workshops to kind of help you build the project proposal, think through the dissertation and those workshops will run for the group as a whole. So it'll be your main cohort of around 35 to 40 students, but then you should use the office hours that your tutors will offer or tutors offer at least two hours a week and normally available around that via email to meet on a one-on-one basis to devise your dissertation. So there's also a question here, is there any possibility that I can't take your preferred course? So the list A optional courses in other departments. So you do need to take a requirement for our MA History program is that you take a set number of history courses. So you need to take 60 credits of history courses. You need to take four courses offered on list A. So we hope that you can take all the courses on this day that you would like to. Timetabling obviously is an issue in this and it may be that there are classes that clash. We try and avoid this as much as possible, but the timetable team that so as our extraordinary human beings. Precisely because our degree programs allow people so much choice between different programs, they're having to balance a lot of different demands. So there is a chance that you will have a clash in your timetable with between courses that you like, but we will help you to find courses that fit your interests as best as best as we can. I'd say that our commitment to building tailor-made courses for you runs deep. As well as having academic tutors, you'll also be assigned to a personal advisor who will meet with you right at the beginning of the program, talk you through and advise you on your course options. So that would be the person to sort of talk through any problems with timetabling that you're having. There are a lot of colleagues in other departments outside of history who run very historical courses and we can and we have recognized some of those courses taught outside the history department as history courses that can count for your List A courses, but we do need to manage that on a kind of individual basis. So do please try to find as many List A courses as that interest you as possible, but if not come and talk to me and talk to your personal advisor who you'll be allocated to right at the beginning of the program. So the fifth question is all the classes are held during term one, term two. So what can you do in the third term? The third term is for you to write your dissertation, which is a serious piece of work. So that's right, all the classes run in term one and term two, but the third term is set up very much for you to begin your research project, to meet with your dissertation supervisor, really kind of hone your archives, set up that dissertation, which you then write over the summer. So the third term is the research term where your mental stuff is still available for meeting where you really need to set that project up. What is the dissertation deadline and is there any students who submit early and how early? So the dissertation deadline is normally around the 15th of September. Certainly students do submit early and you can submit the dissertation whenever you like. All assessed coursework is submitted using our online system, which allows you to, I think, take down work and put up second versions of it right the way up until the official deadline. So you could submit something early, then decide you actually want to submit a revised copy and submit that again, closer to the deadline. You need to submit the dissertation when you think it's ready, as sort of in terms of explaining about the credit system in relation to hours of work. So the dissertation is valued at 60 credits, which is the equivalent of 600 hours of work. It's a serious piece of work and we encourage students to take that seriously. We'll give you the, we'll explain how you need to get ready for it and prepare for it, but I think you'll find that you'll need a lot of that summer to work on that dissertation. So the seventh question is, when can I obtain a library card? As soon as you enroll at SOAS, your student card that will get you access to all the buildings also gets you access to the library and all of the resources that functions with that. Your email ID will get you access to all of the online resources that the library has. So that's one of your first tools that you're given when you join SOAS. And then the eighth question is, how many MA students are likely to be interested in Chinese areas per year? That is a question that is very tricky to answer. It varies a lot. We have a lot of students interested in Chinese. History and students who come to study Chinese history from outside the MA history program. So history of art, recruit a lot of students who are interested in China who come and study our courses, but the numbers change every year. What I would say is that we have had a lot of interest in Chinese history this year. Next year we plan to run all tutorials at a capped number of 20 students. So you won't ever be in a class bigger than 20 and we hope to keep you in classes smaller than that. So I hope that that answers that question. And the ninth question, is it possible to take sources and research design in historical research if you're getting the MA history instead of the MA in historical methods? No, the sources and research design course is specific to the MA historical methods course. That is, you can only do that course as part of the historical research methods program. So that is precisely the difference between the two MA courses. If you want to do the sources and research design course, you need to apply to the MA historical methods program and to do that you also need to write a research proposal, setting out clearly your areas of interest, what sort of the topics, the themes, the sources you'd like to explore in those two 5,000 word essays that form the basis of that course. So I, yeah, I hope that that's clear and answers all of those questions. I haven't got any more questions that have been submitted by a chat. Good, thank you. I'm glad I answered all those questions. Okay, thanks. If anybody has more questions, please feel free to send them now. Or if not, please feel free to email me at en2atsoas.ac.uk after this event. I'm available and would always be very happy to answer any concerns, questions, queries, as specific as you need, as you might have.