Why study Natural Sciences at UCL?

So my name is Geraint Thomas. I'm a professor of biochemistry here at UCL and I'm director of the Natural Sciences program. The Natural Sciences degree is run from a virtual department which is constituted in the, ostensibly centrally in the Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, but it reaches out across to three other faculties as well, Faculty of Life Sciences, Faculty of Engineering and also the Faculty of Brain Sciences, so that we can really draw together a huge breadth of modern sciences into one big interdisciplinary program. If you're looking at the really big questions that are going to need answering in the 21st century, you need a certain amount of foresight and a certain amount of insight, but there's an increasing demand to create people with skills across several disciplines who can act to unite activity, who can catalyze interactions that might not normally be there. We put you, you choose one of two streams, you either have, you have a major and a minor stream and in each you will be expected to perform at least as well as people who are studying those single subjects alone. So if you take a stream in physics you will be expected to perform at the same level as a full-time physicist. The Natural Sciences program at UCL is composed of 15 separate streams, so if you think about it you've got something like a 15-dimensional space in which you can explore the different things and how they fit together, so you can cut planes of intellectual curiosity in all sorts of directions through this. If I was looking for a way to determine how successful our program was and if I could count them, it would be the number of aha moments that students have on the program when they realize that a lot of things integrate very easily in sciences that we spend often too much time separating. We shouldn't forget that London is an enormous research centre, it is littered with universities and world-leading research institutes and UCL is connected to a vast number of them and there's a huge academic and scientific traffic between all of these places, between staff, between students, a natural scientist might experience that in their projects, so the first type of student that we see are those students who could be very strong single-subject scientists, physicists, chemists, earth scientists, life scientists, but who feel that they need a wider field to play on. They may have many strengths and they feel that it's too early to focus and that these strengths may lie in disparate disciplines. There are also those students who are really feeling or have felt from an early age the These I really do describe as the natural scientists. There's a big uptake for our graduates into research programs around in the UK and elsewhere and often into elite programs in world-leading research institutes. There's also a large number of our graduates who go into industry and who go into commerce, into finance and into law and because this is a science degree we also see a significant number of people go towards medicine. Natural scientist graduates can go anywhere where intellectual discipline is required and where this is coupled to a capacity for hard work and and mental agility.