Geography at Leicester
Careers
As a Leicester Geography postgraduate, we will help you to start your future career. You will develop specialist technical, analytical and scientific skills, and you will acquire a wide range of transferable skills such as project management, team-working, presentation and communication.
You will have unrivalled spatial awareness and problem-solving skills, and we will provide you with a skills transcript to document your progress. Geography is also relevant for personal and social development including self motivation and interpersonal skills, confidence-building, project design and implementation, and critical analysis and debate.
We will teach you modules that develop key employability skills. Geography helps to explain the formation of places and landscapes, the interactions between environment and people and how economies and societies are interconnected. Increasingly, we have to be able to think spatially using maps, images (real or virtual) and other sources of data. We have to be able to formulate questions and collect, process and analyse data. We have to find meaning in trends, patterns and anomalies, and effectively communicate this to politicians, scientists and the public.
The University also has a dedicated Careers and Employability Service that is there for your use. You can arrange one-to-one meetings to discuss your career plans, check your CV and take assessment tests.
Links with business
Your research thesis may be of interest to a company or business. For example, a number of our former students received support for undertaking their thesis from the Ordnance Survey.
We have strong links with businesses, government offices and industry (both locally and nationally), and our research has much to offer organisations in the public, private and voluntary sector. In recent years, members of staff have been involved in a number of highly successful collaborative projects, including:
- The informal economy and community self-help (Nottinghamshire Business Link and the Countryside Agency)
- Earth observation techniques and applications (European Space Agency and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission)
- The political and economic situation in the Russian far east (BP Exploration)
- Metadata for spatial information (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Monks Wood and ADAS Ltd.)
- GIS service accessibility modelling (Ministry of Health, New Zealand)
We have also worked with Infoterra Ltd., Syngenta, the East Midlands Regional Development Agency, the Home Office, DEFRA, Sainsbury's and many others.
Hear from our graduates
After leaving the University of Leicester, I took a job as a Project Coordinator for a retail consultancy called the ORC Partnership, based in rural Oxfordshire. The job involves the practical use of GIS in modelling various retail scenarios, using products developed in-house. The broad nature of the course at Leicester, which gives a solid grounding in geospatial techniques, has equipped me with the knowledge to be able to understand more about the systems used at work, and enables me to discuss developments with our technical team. My work in the consultancy side of the company allows me to see the application of GIS and also involves regular fieldwork trips, which I particularly enjoy!
Having spent three great years in Leicester doing my undergraduate degree in Geography, I didn't hesitate to accept the opportunity to stay for an extra year to do the GIS MSc. Leicester is a great place to study, with lots of friendly people, and the GIS facilities in particular are first class. The experience has given me the motivation, skills and confidence to pursue doctoral research in the geographies of health and healthcare.