Introduction
Your postgraduate study at Essex will give you an opportunity to develop your own ideas and interests, and to engage with thinking at the leading edge of your subject, as part of the research community in your department, school or centre and our wider academic and professional community. Our graduates go into a variety of jobs, where the key employability skills and knowledge they have gained through postgraduate study at Essex are put to good use.
If you achieve your Masters, you may wish to extend your knowledge with a research degree and many who graduate from Essex choose to stay here for research study. Some of our Masters may be taken as the first part of an Integrated PhD, leading to your PhD after a further three years of full-time study.
Career destinations
Given the breadth of our provision within our Department of Language and Linguistics, career prospects for our graduates vary depending on the study undertaken but takers of our MA TEFL and other courses come with the specific intention of entering the ELT/TESOL profession, which they duly go on to do. Graduates of our MA ELT and other courses related to English language teaching and applied linguistics often join us after a career in English teaching, to update their expertise and return to the classroom with a career enhancement. The specialist knowledge you gain enables you to take senior or specialist roles (eg in CALL, ESP, teaching young learners or testing), not necessarily only in the classroom but also in educational advice and management, programme evaluation, syllabus design and teacher education. Our other MAs connect you with careers in computing, language disorders/speech therapy and management.
From most of our taught courses there is a natural progression to PhD study, using the research training in your MA. Often the career destination is university lecturing or research. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the areas of linguistics we cover, this could be in departments of English, linguistics, education, sociology or even cognitive science. For example, from our MA Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics, several graduates have taken academic posts at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and at the Universities of Tuebingen, Hamburg, Kobe, and Thessaloniki. Other careers our postgraduates have gone on to, where the generic skills they acquired with us are also valued, include publishing, social work, administration, retail and public speaking.
Support for postgraduates
Our University has a range of support services designed to help you to achieve your full potential and get the most out of your studies. These form a co-ordinated network of support, and are an important part of your overall student experience at Essex.
Within our Department of Language and Linguistics, we have University of Essex Scholarships available. Please contact our Department directly for more details.
Our University of Essex is an ESRC accredited Doctoral Training Centre, meaning our Department has recognition for politics and international relations for Home and EU students. You must have an offer of admission for both your Masters and your PhD programmes before being eligible to apply for an ESRC studentship. Supervisors are on hand to guide you through the application process.
All scholarships are highly competitive and, particularly if you are intending to apply for our ESRC Doctoral Training Centre studentships, we strongly advise that you contact us in advance, so we can link you with your supervisor at the earliest opportunity to give you plenty of time to work on your scholarship application.
Research study opportunities
Within our Department of Language and Linguistics, we offer supervision for PhD and MPhil. Comprising 24 academic staff, we offer teaching and research supervision in: language acquisition, language learning and language teaching; culture and communication; psycholinguistics; language disorders; sociolinguistics; and theoretical and descriptive linguistics.