Postgraduate students can take any of our third and fourth year undergraduate courses delivered within the School. The methods of assessment on  these taught courses are light touch and may include completing some homework or giving a presentation. 

The Taught Course Centre (TCC) is a collaboration between the Mathematics Departments of Bath, Bristol, Imperial College, Oxford and Warwick and funded by a grant from the EPSRC. The TCC offers about 25 lecture courses across Applied and Pure Mathematics and Probability. Courses are delivered using interactive audio-visual technology: lectured from one institution, they may be attended interactively in all. These courses are given by leading experts across a broad range of research areas and are aimed at providing postgraduate students an advanced level of tuition in a broad range topics. See the TCC website for more information.

First year PhD students in statistics are expected to attend four one-week residential courses provided by the national Academy for PhD Training in Statistics (APTS). Delivered collaboratively by nine prominent UK Statistics research groups, these intensive APTS courses give new postgraduate students drawn from across the UK the chance to get together and learn (formally and informally) from top class researchers, in a stimulating academic and social environment. Typically the following courses are offered: statistical computing, statistical inference, statistical modelling, statistical asymptotics, applied stochastic processes, computer intensive statistics, survival analysis and nonparametric smoothing. See the APTS website for more information.

The School of Mathematics organises a large number of research seminars and special lecture events, across all areas of research. There are more than 15 weekly seminar series available, in addition to several other events throughout the year such as the Distinguished Lecture Series. All postgraduate students are expected to attend at least one seminar series relevant their research. ‘Formal’ seminars are given by distinguished visitors from elsewhere in Britain and abroad. ‘Informal’ seminars are usually given by people already in Bristol  including postgraduates themselves. See our events page for the latest events in the schedule of seminars and special lectures.

In journal clubs, PhD students and other researchers give presentations about publications they have read recently; in reading groups, new material can be learnt together. Some of these are assessed and count towards the required 100 hours of assessed courses.

The Bristol Doctoral College provides information, guidance and skills training for all postgraduate students working towards a doctoral degree. The School of Mathematics runs an induction course for all postgraduate students during welcome week providing an introduction to the University and the basic skills required for postgraduate work.