back to faqStudying for an MSc in Investigative
Psychology at the University of Liverpool
From time to time I do get asked
general questions about our MSc course and the context of Liverpool,
that people do not seem able to answer from the existing documentation.
So, the following notes are intended as general comments that may be
of help, particularly for people from overseas who do not know much
about Britain or how our Master's courses operate.
Perhaps the first thing to note about our MSc activity is that it is very much part of the Centre for Investigative Psychology. At any point in time we have about 15 people engaged in full-time three/four year doctorates here, as well as another half dozen or so who are registered part-time. We also have some postdoctoral fellows who are engaged in research and a little teaching activity. Most of these people have completed the 12-month MSc in Investigative Psychology course in the past. Associated with this group of Investigative Psychologists are other people involved in studies of safety in industry and other aspects of Organisational Psychology, or Environmental Psychology studies such as the impact of interior design. This does mean that MSc students are encouraged to work with and generally develop contacts across the range of other Applied Psychology activities that are relevant, often working on data from or in collaboration with the PhD students or postdoctoral fellows.
The Centre for Investigative Psychology has nursed extensive links with police forces, prisons, probation services and other agencies that deal with offenders. These are the basis of our research activities, as well as providing a stream of visiting speakers who talk about their work, notably in the investigation of crimes. Some of these organisations also use their contacts as an opportunity to seek out people in relation to job opportunities that they have within their organisation.
The MSc course itself usually has around twenty to thirty people a year on it. These are made up of people with a variety of backgrounds from a variety of countries. However, the majority of them are people with a degree in Psychology, with a few other people whose degrees are in other social sciences, and a few people with police backgrounds. Generally, people are taken on who have good academic qualifications as well as some experience of police investigation, the law, or criminals. As the achievements of the course are becoming more internationally recognised more applications are coming from around the world. Thus, in any one year we would expect between a third and a half of the students to be from outside of Great Britain.
The course is organised as an intensive 12-month course, starting and finishing in late September. Many people are interested in the possibility of part-time employment whilst they are doing the course. This is strongly discouraged. People often say that the MSc course is the most intensive period of activity in which they have ever been engaged, including police officers who have run major murder enquiries. Trying to fit in a job around this is a recipe for failure. The course is actually taught in three 10 week terms, but when there is no formal teaching there is a considerable amount of course work and project work to be completed. After the examinations in May students are involved full-time in completing a dissertation. These turn out to be rather significant pieces of work, many of which eventually find their way into publication.
During the teaching week lectures are planned to take place mainly on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, so that students have the extra four days to carry on with project work and the preparation of course work and the planning of presentations. Most of the lectures are in fact run as half-day sessions in a seminar format, often the seminar being presented by students. The week, thus, is divided up so that there are half-day sessions on each of the following topics: criminal behaviour, information retrieval including interviewing and detective decision-making, research methodology, and development of IT skills. There is also a regular session where visiting speakers provide input on a range of topics including professional matters, but emphasising accounts of major police investigations.
During the breaks between the teaching terms which are euphemistically called vacations, some students do return home to collect data and to continue preparing their course work.
On arrival at the start of the course students are given an extensive course handbook. In addition they are given a CDROM containing lists of most of the reprint holdings that the library keeps. This now runs to about 100 volumes of published papers, as well as projects and dissertations from previous years. The CDROM also includes copies of course work and dissertations from previous years. The course did start in October 1992 at the University of Surrey and then moved to the University of Liverpool to start in October 1994. There are already well over 50 dissertations, laying the groundwork for the new field of Investigative Psychology. These are available in the University of Liverpool Library, restricted in the main to postgraduate students in the Centre for Investigative Psychology.
Some students ask about Liverpool as a base. Any gazetteer or encyclopaedia will give an account of Liverpool and its history. It was a major seaport linking Europe to North America in Victorian times and is about the sixth largest city in the UK. It now draws on a population of the area in which it resides, known as Merseyside, of well over a million, but it is a 40 minute drive from Manchester which draws on a population of perhaps 4 million. It takes only three hours to travel to London on the train. What these numbers do not reveal though is that with approximately 40,000 students in the city it is a very lively place to be a student with a night life that most lecturers regard as far too inviting. The city also has a very long tradition of welcoming overseas visitors. So although the ethnic minorities in the city are not a very large proportion they are very varied and many of them have come from families who have been established in the city for many generations.
The University has a UK Student
Recruitment Office (tel: 0151 794 5927, fax: 0151 794 2060) and an International
Relations and Recruitment Office (tel: +44 (0) 151 794 6730, fax: +44
(0) 151 794 6733).
They provide various documents of guidance to students including updated
information on the costs of being a student in Liverpool. There are
an increasing number of awards available for overseas and other postgraduate
students, but these are still very highly competitive and it should
certainly not be assumed that an offer of any place at the University
of Liverpool guarantees an award. The award competition is quite separate
from the decision to offer a place to an applicant.
Most applicants are invited for interview but where this is practically rather difficult, as is often the case for overseas students, extended correspondence is used to clarify matters. In deciding whether to offer a place to an applicant there are three key criteria:
· One is that the individual has the intellectual ability to complete an intensive Masters level course.
· The second is that the individual is really motivated to contribute to the development of the emerging discipline of Investigative Psychology.
· The third is that the applicant has a very full understanding of the nature of the course, its objectives and framework.
Clearly, determining some of these requires dialogue with applicants, so we are always ready to try and respond to applicants' interests and concerns.
