Microbiology Anyone?
Over on our Facebook page, Heather Collins asked:
And another question – why do so few (UK) universities have microbiology departments these days? There’s been a trend towards bigger academic units, and disciplines who can’t recruit enough students tend to get merged with other departments into units usually called something like “The School of Life Sciences”. In addition, non-human microbiology is out of favour these days, with most of the money going to medical microbiology, and this killed off some microbiology departments who couldn’t or weren’t willing to adapt.
So why do UK universities find it hard to recruit microbiology students? When the A level syllabus changed a few years ago, microbiology all but disappeared. Actually, there is a little bit still there, but not until the A2 stage and it’s no longer offered by all schools. But A2 students have already filled out their UCAS forms. AS students don’t know what microbiology is, so why would they apply to do a degree in it? (They know what genetics is because there’s lots of that at AS level, so many apply to do that as a degree).
Fortunately, there is a solution! At the University of Leicester, we offer you not one but two chances to study microbiology. ”Microbiology” is a broadly based course including environmental microbiology, which “Medical Microbiology” is … well, see if you can figure it out ;-)
Of course, if it’s a bit late for you to be thinking about degree choices, we also offer lots of microbiology PhD and postdoctoral places, so check us out for all your microbiology career requirements :-)
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Tags: Biology, Careers, Education, Microbiology, University of Leicester
