Sociology including Foundation Year

Reasons to choose Kingston

• An optional work placement will enhance your learning and give you valuable work experience for your future career.

• There are opportunities to enrich your studies by participating in field trips.

• You’ll be taught in a vibrant department with events such as student conferences and research seminars.

• Our commitment to high quality teaching has been recognised with a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) Gold rating. The University has received an overall rating of Gold, as well as securing a Gold award in the framework's two new student experience and student outcomes categories.

This course is offered with a Foundation Year in Social Sciences
This foundation year is taught at the University giving you a taste of academic life in a supportive environment. The year gives you the academic and technical preparation for undergraduate study in a wide range of social sciences subjects. Lectures, labs and tutorials will give you a broad understanding across subjects including economics, criminology, sociology and psychology.

About this course
How can we better understand today’s social inequalities, and what can we do to solve them? What impact has globalisation had on our everyday lives? How does our culture and society shape our identity and how we evaluate others? These are the types of questions we examine in our sociology degree.

You’ll look at many areas of social life, such as gender, race, religion and class, family, migration and social change, to understand how power operates, how individual behaviour, norms and values are shaped by the social world, and how conflict exists and is resolved.

Throughout the course, you’ll be asked to reflect on your own life experiences and to consider contemporary real-world issues and events. You’ll make connections with ideas and arguments from other social sciences, such as psychology, criminology, and politics. You’ll take your learning out of the classroom, broadening your experience of work environments and cultural spaces such as museums and galleries.

Future Skills
Embedded within every course curriculum and throughout the whole Kingston experience, Future Skills will play a role in shaping you to become a future-proof graduate, providing you with the skills most valued by employers such as problem-solving, digital competency, and adaptability.

As you progress through your degree, you'll learn to navigate, explore and apply these graduate skills, learning to demonstrate and articulate to employers how future skills give you the edge.

At Kingston University, we're not just keeping up with change, we're creating it.

Career opportunities
Graduates work in social research, teaching, policymaking, the charity sector, local government, human resource management and retail. This degree is an excellent foundation for postgraduate study in sociology and related areas.

A sociology degree prepares students for life after university by teaching key transferable skills that employers are looking for. These include problem-solving and analytic skills; critical thinking and reasoning; team working, project planning and leadership; self-motivation and working independently; managing and interpreting data sets; written and oral communication, including public speaking.

Some graduates have continued their academic studies doing a masters course and doctoral studies in the UK and internationally.

Example modules:
– Social Order and Social Control
– Social Justice and Social Movements
– Researching Race and Ethnicity

For a full list of modules please visit the Kingston University course webpage.

Assessment typically comprises exams (e.g. test or exam), practical (e.g. presentations, performance) and coursework (e.g. essays, reports, self-assessment, portfolios, dissertation).