UNIVERSITY OF the West Indies (UWI) Pro Vice Chancellor and Principal, Professor Kenneth Hall, will be launching the new Master's in Law degree (LLM) programme next month.
This is one of several new Master's and PhD. degrees to be introduced at the UWI this year and over the next five years.
"We have new Master's programmes and PhD programmes...in all of the faculties, in medicine in particular, there's a whole new range of specialisations," Profes-sor Hall told a JIS Think Tank session recently.
There will be new graduate programmes in Mass Communi-cations, Pure and Applied Sciences, Humanities and Education, Management and Social Sciences, Psychology, Medicine, Information Techno-logy, Physics and Chemistry, the Pro Vice Chancellor informed.
"Some of them have started this year," he told the group, "but within the next five years, we will have a full menu of courses in all of the areas," he noted.
The new graduate programmes which were introduced this year are Master's in Public Health, Master's in Nursing, Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, Executive Master's of Business Administra-tion Management Information Systems, Master's in Demography and Master's in Biological Approaches in Ecosystem Management.
Although a commencement date is not yet established, the next set of Masters degrees to be introduced will be: the Masters in Water Resources Management, Masters in Biotechnology and MPhil/Doctorate in Molecular Biology. "Many of these programmes will now be what they call taught Masters," the Professor stated.
Another improvement to the Graduate studies offered at the UWI, is the revised MBA programme. "We emphasise some of the relevant areas - globalisation, information technology - these are areas which we believe deserve some focus and attention," the principal remarked.
Noting that this is an international trend, Professor Hall said, "this is not peculiar to Mona - it is all over the world. When you look at what is happening in England, Europe, generally in the United States and in Australia - all of these countries have identified their universities as areas that must be responsive to the need for competitiveness in the globalised environment."
Graduate students account for almost 20 per cent of the approximately 11,000 students at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus.
