The course

Our MSc Economics degree course is designed to equip you with the tools of a modern economist. It will help prepare you for your chosen career path, whether in the private and financial services sectors or in government or if you wish to continue your studies doing a PhD. Through your studies you will gain a strong grounding in core areas of economics and have the flexibility to tailor your degree to areas you are particularly interested in, such as political economy, financial econometrics or decision theory and behaviour.

Studying in the Department of Economics within the School of Law and Social Sciences at Royal Holloway means that you will learn from internationally renowned experts at one of the UK’s top ten teaching and research Economics departments. Our balanced approach to research and teaching guarantees high quality teaching from subject leaders, cutting edge materials and intellectually challenging debates. You will have close contact with the academic staff teaching on the course and you will receive individual support from the course director.

Our facilities include access to Bloomberg terminals, which are used by financial traders and investment banks globally. These give you access to live financial and economic data, portfolio construction and optimisation tools, information and analytics to support your studies. We are also equipped with state-of-the-art software packages such Stata, Matlab and Python.

A two-week pre-sessional course is available to bring you up to speed with your quantitative skills.

On graduation you will have the ability to solve theoretical and applied problems in economic policy, critically evaluate current research, develop simplified frameworks for studying the real world and be able to appreciate what would be an appropriate level of abstraction for a range of economic issues.

• Excellent career prospects with economics graduates having an impressive employment record and starting salaries amongst the highest in the country
• Be part of a relatively small cohort enabling you to receive individual support from the course director and other academic staff
• Use our in-house economics experiments laboratory to carry out research.

Teaching & assessment

Assessment is carried out by a variety of methods including coursework, examinations and a dissertation.

Your future career

An Economics masters degree at Royal Holloway, University of London will equip you with an enviable range of transferable skills and can lead into a variety of career paths as well as the knowledge and a solid foundation for continued PhD studies. Employers recognise and reward the real knowledge and skills developed in an Economics degree.

We will help students to recognise their own strengths, skills and abilities so that they can make strong applications for their chosen job or further study. We also provide careers support including application and interview coaching, career strategy discussions and the opportunity to network with major employees.

• Our graduates are highly employable and, in recent years, have entered many different economics-related areas, including working in the Public Sector (Government Economics Service), journalism, business analysis. careers as Economists, Journalists and Business Analysts.
• Our graduates are currently working for firms such as Accenture, TNS, Bloomberg, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Suisse, Pricewaterhouse Cooper and Baker and Mackenzie.