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The programme has a very straightforward structure. It has 6 modules that you have to do that
are 20 credits each. And it has one dissertation that you have to do where you specialise in
the dissertation that you want to write and you're supervised by an expert in that particular
field. And out of the 6 modules that you do, three of them have to be compulsory.
The first module, which is what all the MA students have to do is the Research Skills
module. The other module is the Philosophy of Health and Happiness. And then there's
another module called God and the Meaning of Life.
And then the other three modules you can choose from any particular module you want to find
in the Philosophy department on the field of health and happiness.
The uniqueness of this programme is that you might think of health and happiness, it's
understood in many different sorts of ways. On the one hand, it may be understood in a
medical way. It might be understood in a psychological way. It may be understood in a philosophical
way. It can be understood in a theological way as well.
What you find is you have students from all these kinds of backgrounds who are coming
onto this particular programme and the specialists who are teaching this particular programme
are often in dialogue with psychologists and medical practitioners and other philosophers
too. So the experience is you think you knew what health and happiness meant, you get wide
experience in different perspectives on that particular issue.
The campus like a lot of our masters programmes, we try to teach in small groups. So we teach
maybe in classes of no more than about say 10 students. And in that way you get an experience
of engagement with staff at an equal level. We're not trying to cultivate an us and them
attitude. But around the table for the students of health and happiness you will find people
with a variety of different sorts of backgrounds so maybe if you thought that the philosophy
of health and happiness was straightforward, you might find you have historians or people
from the social sciences in the group, bringing whole new questions or even issues into that
particular field.
The programme is primarily for people who are interested in the questions of health
and happiness, but you might think that normally speaking you will be say for philosophers
or theologians or those particular kinds of people, but not a bit of it because often
we get people who are psychologists, people from the social sciences or the social services,
a wide range of different sorts of backgrounds who want to understand the cultural dimensions
of health and happiness too. And maybe they might want to then go back to their social
work or whatever that they're doing and to actually then use the knowledge they've gained
in the masters programme. Or else they might just be doing it because they're interested
in the subject.