When I started at university with my bachelor’s in criminology, the whole concept of research and science was completely new to me. During my bachelor’s, my interests in research started to emerge, and I learned how fun and challenging doing research can be. I followed several courses on methodology, but I had not yet gone through the entire research process of devising, setting up, conducting, and reporting. This is the main reason why I chose for IMARC, because here you have a full year for your research! It allowed me to explore whether a career in research would be something for me. 

Besides further exploring your interests for doing research, I think IMARC offers several more important advantages. First of all, because you have a full year for you research (in the second year of IMARC), you can pick a subject that you like and completely delve into that. With the different tracks, IMARC allows you to pick courses at a university you find interesting. When you have a specific job in mind, this can be helpful as well. Moreover, you can combine your research with an internship, which I did at a municipality. There are several partners of IMARC but approaching others on your own initiative might be possible as well. This did not only offer me research experience, but also more work experience and networking opportunities. Finally, another important note is that the programme is completely English taught. Although this can be challenging at first if you are not a native speaker like me, it absolutely helped me to improve my professional English skills, which stills helps me today. Communicating with your student-peers (and maybe even future friends!) from many different countries offers important cultural learning experiences as well. 

Taken everything together, IMARC is a challenging, but one-of-its-kind criminological research master programme. It has been of great value for my current research, but even if you seek another kind of job after your master’s, I think the skills you will acquire can be of great value!