The Doctorate admits any student with a Bachelors or Master's Degree, of the required standard. This is a research degree, leading to presentation of a thesis and, if University conditions are met, graduation with a PhD degree. Full-time students must study for a minimum of three and maximum of four years to obtain this degree. The Doctorate is the most common requirement for an academic post and many research positions both in academia and industry. However, some of our students simply choose to do a PhD because they have found something that really interests them, and they wish to pursue these in an intellectual environment, guided by research leaders in their chosen field of study. The emphasis is very much upon independent but supervised research. All students have at least two supervisors, who will guide students through to completion of a substantial piece of work which must be original, significant and contain publishable material. Along the way both generic and subject-specific training will be provided by the Department, Faculty and University. We will also carefully monitor and assess your progress. Career includes: Postgraduate study at Durham presents an opportunity to develop a range of higher level research skills that can be transferred to the wider graduate job market. The specific learning and skills opportunities presented by Geography at Masters level are relevant to careers in a diverse range of areas including property and surveying, environmental consultancy and management, conservation, town planning, geopolitical risk, market research, development work, health, public policy, social research, logistics, youth and community work, education, energy, utilities and tourism. It is important to note that accredited professional study will be required for some of the aforementioned career areas. Other Masters students' progress into careers with no direct relevance to human or physical geography including banking, law, PR, consultancy, insurance, IT, retail, advertising, publishing, journalism and media.