Overview
If you want to help solve crimes, it pays to understand criminality from many different angles. This course gives you much broader skills, knowledge and experience than a more traditional ‘forensic science’ degree. Using facilities shared with a real police force, this degree is always relevant, innovative and up-to-date.
From crime scene to evidence lab to court room, you’ll find out how forensic investigation fits into the history, policy and practice of the criminal justice system. And you’ll study the causes of crime, learning what really makes a criminal.
Course highlights
- Develop specialist forensic skills in simulated crime scene and laboratory practical sessions
- Explore new experimental techniques including the use of Virtual Reality, inspired by our innovative VR research
- Learn from criminology, probation and policing experts who are actively involved in industry, and who shape its future with ground-breaking research in areas like forensic interview techniques and wildlife crime
- Hear from guest speakers such as fire investigators, crime scene managers, pathologists, firearm officers and forensic archaeologists
- Study alongside operational police units and learn directly from operational policing staff
- Have the opportunity to do a criminology work placement year after your second or third year on this Connected Degree - we're the only UK university to offer flexible sandwich placements for undergraduates
- Tailor your degree from a wide range of modules, including crime and mental health, hate crime, dangerous offenders and public protection
- Gain pre-entry qualifications for careers in the police or probation service, and develop skills in problem solving and analysis that all kinds of employers value
- Choose to learn a foreign language for free as part of your degree, from a selection of Arabic, British Sign Language, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin or Spanish
Careers and opportunities
Because this course blends criminology and forensic studies, you’ll graduate with a particularly broad range of careers open to you. Your lecturers can help you identify the options that excite you most, so you can choose to study modules that fit your ambitions.
You’ll be especially well-prepared for the wide variety of criminal justice careers where forensic awareness plays a key role – from forensic practitioner in the police, probation or prison services, through to rewarding areas of expertise like community safety, crime prevention and criminological research. More broadly, the impressive problem-solving skills you develop could prove valuable in all kinds of careers.
Our graduates have gone on to roles including:
- crime scene investigator
- investigative data analyst
- police officer
- intelligence researcher
- probation officer
- youth offending support officer
- emergency planning officer
- prison officer
- forensic and other laboratories
- teaching (with further training)
You could also do postgraduate study in areas such as forensic science.
