The staff are also strongly committed to the provision of effective and stimulating teaching, in which we share with our students the latest ideas and information and discuss how best to combine the new discoveries with what was known before. The quality of the Department's teaching has been shown in external assessments and is also demonstrated by the numbers of our students who are awarded First Class degrees. Our active teaching staff, in conjunction with the substantial teaching resources of the rest of the University of London, provide an extraordinarily wide range of historical subjects which students can choose to pursue according to their own interests. All students begin by taking foundation courses, designed to develop analytical skills and understanding through guided exploration of a wide variety of different historical problems. Alongside and after these foundation courses you are given the greatest possible opportunity to pursue your own historical interests as they develop.
Flexibility is facilitated by the organisation of the degrees into a course unit system.
You choose which course units to take in each year and are examined in each unit at the end of the year in which it is taught, before proceeding to the next units. The Department maintains close contact with each individual student. Each student is assigned to a Personal Adviser who is available to help and advise, both academically and otherwise, throughout the course. In particular, the Personal Adviser will assist you to select, from the very wide range of options available, areas of study which relate to each other and which provide a sense of the development of societies and institutions over a period of time. The Department is housed in the purpose-built McCrea Building.