How are your wort boiling, malting and mashing skills? If they need some refinement, then Heriot-Watt University, with its MSc in brewing and distilling, is the place for you. Postgraduate courses come in all shapes and sizes these days and even the more unusual ones can open up new career paths for students.

The MSc in flood risk at the University of Plymouth, for example, has been designed to meet the demand for specialists to handle the threat of coastal and river flooding. Dr David Simmonds, the programme manager, says: “We take graduates from civil engineering courses but also from geography and environmental sciences.” Typically, alumni move on to environmental consultancies or government agencies such as the Met Office.

At University College London, the increasing interest in its MA in archives and records management, established in 1947, reflects the growing importance of archival principles and practice, says Dr Andrew Flinn, the programme director. The course opens up career options in institutions such as the National Archives and university libraries, and legislation on freedom of information and data protection has widened the potential job market to include maintenance of contemporary records. “There is quite a breadth of opportunities for people to go into,” he says.

There is no specific career path out of the postgraduate programme in Utopian studies, also at the University of Plymouth, says Malcolm Miles, professor of cultural theory in the faculty of arts. But learning how to think widely and critically gives students skills suited to creative industries.

The course draws on philosophy, literature and history, as well as contemporary “Utopias” such as eco-villages. Utopia is a burgeoning research area, Miles says. A conference at the university attracted 100 delegates “from Alaska to Japan, via Addis Ababa”.

From Utopia to dystopia and mass murder, at Kingston University – specifically, an MA in human rights and genocide studies, currently in its first year. “We ran a two-day conference on mass murder,” says Philip Spencer, the associate dean of the faculty of arts and social sciences. “There was so much interest we decided we would look to do a general course on genocide.” The resulting MA is a col-laborative venture with three other European universities and the Kingston course has attracted students from around the world, including some who were themselves victims of human rights abuses.

Aamer Mahmud is course director of the MA in vehicle interiors at Coventry University. He says that this new course reflects the fact that the inside of a car is now given the same design attention as its shiny exterior. “The exterior is to get people into the showroom but once in, it’s the interior that sells the car,” he says. Applicants to the MA are expected to have a first degree in design, fashion, textiles or engineering.

Finally, if brewing, floods, genocide or walnut dashboards do not do it for you, what about the University of Liv-erpool’s MA in popular music stud-ies? Dr Marion Leonard, the programme director, says that the course “mixes the social study of music, historical study and textual analysis”. Core modules include popular music and daily life, while among the optional modules is “music and the legal system”. Cue Jailhouse Rock.

It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it ...

The Queen might think otherwise but there are many versions of the English language and Adam Pearson is studying them.

The MA in varieties of English at the University of Essex is a one-year, full-time programme that explores geographical and social variations in English and how they relate to speakers’ gender, ethnicity and regional origins.

Use of language is a subject that first hooked Pearson when he was at school. “I had a teacher who had done linguistics and I became quite attracted to it,” he says. A levels, including English language, led him to a first degree in linguistics at Essex and then on to the MA.

“Essentially, it’s about how different people speak,” he says. “I like the idea of looking at how language is used and how language shapes society and society shapes language.”

The course has a strong research component, teaching methodological and analytical skills. Pearson is currently applying those skills to the study of black American English and how it has evolved since the days of slavery. This year he is one of only two students on the varieties of English programme but there is shared learning with postgraduates on some of the university’s 22 other specialist MAs in linguistics. The language and linguistics department at Essex is one of the largest in the world.

So where next for Pearson? “I’m quite interested in teaching at the moment,” he says. “Maybe in a secondary school or, if I do a PhD, in a university.”