Student Experience

Students in our programmes come from a wide variety of cultures and regions and represent many different traditions and lifestyles. Our Department welcomes diversity in the classroom in terms of age, socio-economic background, culture, religion and sexual orientation.

The students who have taken programmes in our department have found them not only to be interesting and stimulating but also relevant to careers in further education in areas as diverse as Museum Studies, journalism and media, International Relations, Human Rights, and Law. This is partly due to the fact that we aim to provide students with a broad educational experience where study tours, visits to diverse communities and engagement with international scholars and thinkers are central to undergraduate and postgraduate activities.

Students may also participate in Trinity's Broad Curriculum programme which offers an opportunity to study outside your principal discipline. Trinity currently offers Broad Curriculum modules in global environmental change, business studies, literature, film studies, geology, history, art and society, linguistics, law, philosophy, psychology, politics, science and sociology. These modules are designed specifically for students who are studying another subject area and are usually available to students in the Senior Freshman (second) or Junior Sophister (third) year.

Studying Abroad

Students may choose to spend a semester abroad. Depending on their other subject(s) students may choose to spend this period at a university in Europe, the Middle East, or, through College’s wider schemes, in North America, Australia and many other parts of the world.

Careers

The Middle Eastern, Jewish and Islamic Civilisations degree programme is an arts degree and graduates have skills that are highly valued by potential employers and they pursue the same kinds of careers as other arts graduates. Trinity College's Careers Advisory Service recently surveyed employers about what they looked for in arts graduates and top of the list came: enthusiasm for the position, personal qualities and transferable skills such as good oral communication, written communication, team work and problem solving. Students of Jewish and Islamic civilisations have ample opportunity to develop all of these skills within a department that is relatively small and very student centred. A knowledge of the cultures, values and histories of different societies in the global community is an advantage for many types of careers.

Our graduates have followed careers in areas such as law, NGOs, journalism and media, and teaching. They also have been very successful in gaining places in MA and PhD programmes.

Our Graduates

Sarah Rooney (Middle Eastern and European Languages and Cultures, 2023) went on to study the MSc in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford.