MA Social Anthropology / Careers

The MA Social Anthropology course trains you in a broad range of transferable skills that are useful in many walks of life, including assessing basic research reports, effective essay-writing, oral presentational skills in seminars and other contexts, basic computing skills, using the internet as a research tool and conducting bibliographic research.

Past graduates of the MA in Social Anthropology have gone on to many different careers, both inside and outside of academic life. As it is a 'conversion' course aimed at those who want to explore anthropology after undergraduate studies in another field, or at least within a different anthropological tradition, it often represents a major change of career direction, opening up a wide range of different possibilities.

About 20% of our graduates carry on their studies and enrol in doctoral research, either here or elsewhere. The MA in Social Anthropology also provides appropriate preparation for careers in which an informed awareness of social and cultural diversity is important. Other past students have gone on to work in the voluntary sector, either in the UK or with overseas development agencies, while others have gone on to work in the media or cultural industries, or in education at many different levels.

A number of graduates have found opportunities in business or the civil service, where ethnography-based studies are increasingly popular as a way of finding out how people - from consumers to employees - interact with their everyday worlds.