BA Advertising, Public Relations and Media Degree

Overview & facilities

This dynamic BA Advertising, Public Relations and Media degree with Honours is unique in that it will provide you with an excellent grounding in the key areas of both the advertising and public relations industries. Being the two most closely aligned areas of communication, and central to the operations of media, cultural and other industries, a degree in this subject will lead to many exciting career opportunities in the industry.

The BA Advertising, Public Relations and Media degree blends media theory with the practices of specific industry processes, from planning PR and Ad campaigns to a critical reflection on the influence of these practices on industries, audiences and the contemporary media.

You'll also benefit from being able to focus on issues and practices relevant to your specific interests in Advertising and PR right from year one, rather than starting with more general areas of marketing beforehand.

London offers excellent placement opportunities, as it is still the hub of the Advertising and Public Relations industries. Students on the courses have worked in marketing, advertising and PR departments within a wide range of media and cultural industries, from fashion to charities, and companies such as Frank PR, Oxfam, Virgin and Bloomsbury, to the BBC, MTV, and publications such as The Guardian and Daily Mirror, as well as in mainstream PR/communications departments.

You'll work closely with our tutors, many of which are professional journalists, editors, experts in communications, marketing/PR, media theory and related areas, and be fully supported in the development of specific and transferable skills, that will prepare you for your chosen career in the industry, or for postgraduate work. Our guest lecturers have included representatives from Barnardo's, Dove Marketing campaign and Edelman PR.

Content & modules

Modules

• Year 1

  Introduction to Journalism (30 Credits) - Compulsory

  The module introduces students to the skills, practices and institutions of journalism. It will give students a practical and historically contexted grounding in journalism as a legally constrained, culturally shaped and stylistically informed practice, governed by economic and political imperatives. Students will be given the opportunity both to sharpen their own journalistic abilities as well as their knowledge and understanding of newspaper, magazine and online journalism industries.

  Issues in Media, Politics and Culture (30 Credits) - Compulsory

  The course will complement the theoretical learning on MCS1100 by providing students with the knowledge and skills to investigate, discuss and critically evaluate contemporary issues in media, politics and culture. Students will learn about current social issues, and how these are mediated through press and broadcasting, and in culture. The course will provide a foundation in cognitive and practical skills relevant to the MCS programme, and provide students with transferable graduate skills.

  Media Communication Practices in Context (30 Credits) - Compulsory

  This module aims to Provide students with a practical introduction to specific contemporary media technologies and the communications practices they entail; Give students an appreciation of the importance of situating their understanding of media technologies within a social and cultural context; Develop an analysis of the interaction of form and content in the production of media messages.

  Media Discourses: Texts and Contexts (30 Credits) - Compulsory

  The module s main aims are as follows: - To equip students with the foundational skills for study in the JCM, PLM, and related, programmes; - To introduce students to processes of meaning production in the media alongside developing a critical understanding of issues and concepts of cultural representation; - To enable students to develop a knowledge of key approaches to analysing how different types of language and image produce concepts, ideas, values and feelings. - To provide a critical context in which to introduce students to Personal Development Planning PDP and graduate skills in personal learning and career planning, as well as elements of IT through library sessions in researching and identifying relevant resources

• Year 2

  Communication Techniques (30 Credits) - Compulsory

  The module aims to develop students abilities in a range of professional communication tasks which are characterised by a high degree of rhetorical convention alongside their need for individual creativity. Practical tasks during the module include introductory speeches, announcements, interviews, business presentations, press releases and written proposals, and focus on discourse strategies rather than basic English vocabulary or structures. In order to build awareness as well as practical ability, a range of linguistic approaches are used to illuminate discourse strategies appropriate to each given idiom and situation.

  Critical Feature-Writing and Editing (30 Credits) - Optional

  The overall aims of this module are: 1. To equip students with a critical, theoretical and practical understanding of editing and feature writing with a focus on an applied knowledge of relations between editing, journalistic writing and its contexts, in particular considerations of genre, market and readership. 2. To help students to develop and demonstrate an inquiring, critical and reflective approach to the complex interaction between writing, readers, the role of editing and the editor in the production, circulation and reception of texts. 3. To be of more general application in developing skills in the practice of researching and writing clearly and concisely to a brief: in relation to specific markets and editorial contexts.

  Issues in Researching and Developing Media Projects (30 Credits) - Compulsory

  PLM2000 has the following main aims: - To introduce students to contemporary debates in media, and related areas of cultural studies and to key approaches to studying the media and media industries: processes, practices, products, audiences/consumers; and to enable students to develop the skills and knowledges required to critically evaluate such debates and approaches - To enable students to draw on a critical evaluation of contemporary debates in media, and related areas of cultural, studies, key issues and approaches to studying the media and media industries and apply this to the development of planning and development of a research proposal framed by a detailed literature review - To enable students to make productive connections between devising and developing independent projects and the frameworks of their taught programmes - To help students develop the independent research skills they will need to flourish in academic and vocational contexts and to appreciate the importance of thinking critically

  Media for Advertising and Marketing (30 Credits) - Compulsory

  The module s main aims are as follows: - To promote an informed and critical approach to the history, development, current state and future trajectory of contemporary advertising: industry, processes and practices; - To develop students knowledge and understanding of advertising as a marketing practice - To develop skills in analysing existing and considering potential advertising campaigns; - To go beyond the mechanistic and for students to interrogate and reflect on advertising s place in consumer culture and on the complex interrelationship between advertising and the media.

  Media, Events, Ethics (30 Credits) - Optional

  This module guides students through the puzzling array of ethical issues which contemporary media practices have to confront. It facilitates students in the development of critical thinking about representation and professional media ethics. It will also help students situate their practice in contexts riven by competing and conflicting sets of interests and to deepen and refine a contextual approach to thinking about media through an emphasis on working with complex case study material.

  Writing and Publishing Online and Electronic Media (30 Credits) - Optional

  To introduce students to a variety of disciplinary methodologies through which to develop a critical approach to both desktop and online publishing; Provide a critical and practical framework within which students can engage with the study of editorial design, content creation and creative implementations for the digital network and print media; and the application of this to the production of practical projects.

• Year 3

  Creating and Understanding Meaning (30 Credits) - Optional

  This module looks at how meanings are constructed and understood in linguistic communication with a particular focus on discourse in contemporary media. Relevant theoretical work in the fields of semantics and pragmatics is outlined and critically evaluated, with a particular focus on the processes of decoding and inference through which interpretations are constructed. This work is then applied in looking at how meanings are constructed and understood in a range of contemporary media. Work on media meanings aims to develop a broad description of language use in media communication, and explores features of media communication in terms of speech-event types and discourse genres. Current controversies over media literacy are linked to longstanding debates about orality and literacy, and regulatory issues regarding media language use are discussed in relation to frameworks of freedom of expression.

  Independent Project Single (30 Credits) - Optional

  This module builds on work undertaken on PLM2000. The module s main aims are: - To enable students to design, refine and undertake a sustained piece of self-directed, independent work: this might take a number of forms but the primary distinction will be between a formal dissertation-style piece or a practical project accompanied by a formal, academically grounded critique. - To promote the development of an independent project: the aims and focus of which will be grounded in, and directly relevant to, the overall framework of the programme being undertaken - To enable students to produce work which will build on, extend and/or refine issues, practices, concepts and approaches which formed part of the individual student s learning experience on their relevant programme. - To build on critical frameworks and practices from previous modules in the student s programme rather than to formally introduce new material

  Language and Power at Work (30 Credits) - Optional

  This module aims to build on the level two modules CML2102 Language and Society and CML2103 Communication Techniques by giving students the ability to analyse a range of texts from different professional contexts and identify the ways in which power relations between participants operate. In doing so, students will engage with theoretical ideas about language, gender, power and identity at work. Through the use of examples from different professional contexts for example advertising, law and business students will gain an extensive knowledge of the social and pragmatic details of professional genres and registers. Building on work carried out in CML2103 Communication Techniques, the module also aims to give the students a greater awareness of and skill at participating within particular professional speech events through interactive role play exercises based on interviews and meetings.

  Marketing: PR and Promotion (30 Credits) - Compulsory

  The module s main aims are as follows: - To introduce processes and practices of marketing as they apply to the area of promotion and in particular PR and related promotional strategies and to critically reflect on these using case studies and examples drawn from the contemporary media and cultural industries; - To promote a critical, inquiring approach to analysing and producing PR materials and strategies, with a focus on media relations; - To enable students to adopt a critically inquiring stance towards practices of PR and related promotional strategies, especially as they relate to a wider consideration of theories and concepts of promotional culture; - To enable a sustained inquiry into the possible relations between PR and wider media practices, in particular that between PR and journalism.

  Work Placement (30 Credits) - Optional

  Students will have begun preparing for work placement and the opportunities and challenges of producing a work placement related project in PLM2000. The main aims of the work placement project are: - To extend the student learning experience through active participation in, and formal reflection on, the workplace: a fundamental part of this process should be the critical reflection on the translation, and refinement of skills and knowledges, gained on specific PLM programmes to participation in the work place. - To develop a critical perspective on the relation between formal and informal experiential learning. - Students to learn as much as possible about the practices of their chosen organisation, while critically reflecting on the economic, social and cultural context in which it operates. A fundamental part of this process will be critical self-reflection on contributions made to the work setting, and the impact of the work place on self-development; as well as on how the work place selected relates to wider circuits of cultural and media production - To enable students to produce work which will build on, extend and/or refine issues, practices, concepts and approaches which formed part of the student s learning experience on their relevant programme inform an overall work placement project, which references and develops issues and debates informed by or relevant to the chosen work placement - To enable students to build on critical frameworks and practices from previous modules in the student s programme; apply these to the work placement and to the production of a self-devised, independent project

  Writing Techniques (30 Credits) - Optional

  The module investigates principles of the organisation of writing at many levels, from the phrase to the whole text. Students also practice their own writing and experiment with the different effects achieved by different linguistic decisions. It seeks to enable students to recognise and name the principal components of sentences and texts, and introduces a range of linguistic and discourse-analytic approaches to written discourse. Through a series of practical analyses, the module helps students to understand, and be able to comment critically on, relative strengths and weaknesses of alternative accounts of any given extract of written discourse. More generally, the module demonstrates how at every level there are stylistic choices to be made between alternative wordings, and how different choices are appropriate for different readerships and different communicative purposes.

  Writing the City (30 Credits) - Optional

  Writing the City invites students to develop a detailed consideration of the interactions between media systems in the broadest sense of the word, and their environments. Using writing as a metaphor and a conception of the city as a surface of inscription, it invites students to think about how the city is written, how the sense we make of the places we live in is constructed - and sometimes deconstructed - through media. By considering a variety of media forms - from the lowly sticker and the maligned art of graffiti to monumental architecture, installation art and hyper complex computer networks - Writing the City produces an understanding of the spaces we live in as complex assemblages of discourse, media technologies and architectural forms. Writing the City also aims to encourage students to employ their myriad local knowledge in order to engage directly with the fabric of urban life by thematically and methodologically addressing the place of experience in modernity and its aftermath.

Entry & applying

We normally make offers on a minimum of 240 UCAS tariff points, plus GCSE English Language at grade C. BTEC National Diploma/International Baccalaureate/Advanced Progression Diplomas at equivalent tariff. Access to HE - Pass. Applications from candidates without formal qualifications are welcomed. Additionally overseas students whose first language is not English will need a qualification that demonstrates competence in English, eg IELTS 6.0 or TOEFL 550 paper-based or 213 computer based.

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Qualifications accepted

For a comprehensive list of qualifications accepted by Middlesex, see further information under entry requirements

English language requirements

You must have competence in English language and we normally require Grade C GCSE or an equivalent qualification. The most common English Language requirements for international students are IELTS 6.0 (with minimum 5.5 in all four components) or TOEFL internet based 72 (with at least 17 in listening & writing, 20 in speaking and 18 in reading).

Middlesex also offers an Intensive Academic English course (Pre-Sessional) that ranges from 5-17 weeks depending on your level of English. Successful completion of this course would meet English language entry requirements. For more information on applying for the pre-sessional please email english@mdx.ac.uk. 

Entry into year two or three (transfer students)

If you have achieved a qualification such as a foundation degree or HND, or have gained credit at another university, you may be able to enter a Middlesex course in year two or three. For full details of how this works see transfer students

UK/EU applicants with existing higher education qualifications

If you have already been awarded a qualification at the same level as the course you are applying for, you may not be eligible for a tuition fee loan, see fees and funding for more information.

Applying

Applications for UK and EU students should be made to UCAS – the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service. The institution code for Middlesex is M80, and the code name is MIDDX. You also need the code for the course you wish to apply for – this is found in the 'at a glance' box above.

International students from outside the EU can make a direct application.  We have a network of regional offices across the world to assist you with your application.  They have worked with people from your region coming to Middlesex before and can help. Read more on international applications

Fees & funding

The tuition fee for the 2012/2013 academic year for UK/EU students is £9,000.
The tuition fee for the 2012/2013 academic year for International students is £10,400.

Click here to find out more about fees, funding and our scholarships in 2012.

Careers & placements

On this unique course you can explore approaches to working in a diverse range of organisations, including the corporate or marketing communications divisions of commercial or charitable organisations, through tospecialist advertising and PR departments in specific media industries. As a graduate, you could start a career in internal communications or information management; work in the communications department of a charity organisation, or work in a PR or Advertising Agency.

Placements

Work placements are proven to increase your success in the job market – as well as being a fantastic experience. Media is a highly competitive field so we encourage as many students as possible to grasp this opportunity. As part of your third year you will have the opportunity to carry out a short placement of a minimum of 15 days.  This will provide you with first-hand experience of a media organisation such as magazine publishers or broadcasters. We have a Placement Office which will support you through the placement process.