 Hello, my name is Karen Allen and I'm a relatively recent graduate from the Master's Programme in International Relations and Contemporary War from King's College London. I graduated in 2018, I spent two years doing the long distance studying and then about a year writing my dissertation. It's a thoroughly professional, well-organised and informative course and I decided to do the Master's because I wanted to try and deepen my understanding from some of the issues that I had covered in my past, in my career, as a foreign correspondent and it certainly did what it said on the tin. I was particularly interested in looking at Insurgency, Encounter Insurgency, International Humanitarian Law and some of the theories of international relations and it's a very broad, broad course. The range of people that are participating in the course, also fascinating, we had doctors, we had NGO people, we had ex-military, we had intelligence, we had other journalists and we had people who were from a completely different background with no relation to international relations at all. We had business people, we had accountants, so it really is very diverse and it's very well-organised such that although you're learning remotely, and I was doing this from South Africa, you're able to gather together with other students and to discuss with them some of the topics and we do that virtually. Of course leaders are very attentive, they're very available to feedback, I certainly was very daunted about going back to university after such a long time and trying to crack the ability to write good essays, but there's a lot of support there. What have I done with it since? Well, I now am a consultant with the Institute for Security Studies, it's an applied policy think tank looking at security issues across Africa and it feeds into some of the policy discussions that are happening at UN and African Union level, so it's been incredibly relevant and frankly without doing the master's programme I wouldn't have had the ability to be able to pitch to do those kinds of jobs. So I would thoroughly recommend it, it's a very interesting course, it's incredibly topical materials that are provided on the course include contemporaneous video materials and documentary evidence. So if you're interested in things like the ICC, if you're interested in the unintended consequences of some of the new technologies that are coming on board for example international humanitarian law, if you're interested in how the big institutions like the UN and the World Bank operate, this is definitely the course for you.