MSc Accounting and Finance with CIMA with Professional Practice

You will study the following modules:

• International Financial Reporting (15 credits): This module seeks to deepen and broaden your ability to prepare, analyse and critically interpret financial statements. It will enable you to explore the principles and theories of international financial reporting and analysis and introduce you to recent critical debate on the sufficiency of conventional financial accounting practices.
• Finance for Management (15 credits): This module develops your critical understanding of essential management accounting and finance topics within a business environment, enabling you to develop high-level understanding of how financial information helps to make informed and accurate management decisions.
• Advanced Management Accounting (15 credits): This module extends the techniques of management accounting in its role in shaping short- and long-term decision-making, in analysis, planning and control. This module also places management accounting techniques within its strategic context to help you understand how you can support the strategic objectives of a business.
• Corporate Financial Management (15 credits): This module is designed to introduce key concepts and principles of modern finance and financial management and apply them to the main decisions faced by financial managers.
• Research Methods: Problems and Solutions (20 credits): This module is designed to develop both your theoretical research knowledge, and your practical insights into the purpose, nature, execution, and value of research approaches and how these can be effectively utilised in the solving of problems in the context of academic knowledge creation or organisational professional practice.
• Contemporary Issues in Business and Society (15 credits): This module aims to enable you to reach a well-grounded understanding of the theory and practice of international management and relate it to events taking place at a global and national level. Utilising the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a discursive element within the module, the ways in which business can positively contribute to achieving these will be critically evaluated. This module also explores what it is to be a Master's student so that all students enrolled in the course can access this higher level of postgraduate education in an effective manner.
• Data Analytics for Management Decision-Making (15 credits): This module explores the sources of data, how that data is collected, processed, and presented, and then continues the data lifecycle by considering how this is used within informed decision-making processes within contemporary enterprises. With so much data noise, how can business be certain that the data they are using is reliable and valid? How can they then link that to a primary function within management and leadership, making decisions? Using case studies, debate and in-class scenario exercises, the module will link data and action in an interesting and informed manner.
• Strategic Management (15 credits): Strategic management concerns itself with assessing what’s important, determining how to get there, and avoiding the potential pitfalls. By focusing on long-term sustainable success, it enables practitioners to avoid the noise of the day-to-day. The module incorporates strategic concepts, tools, and techniques that organisations can employ to assess their environment and resources and make strategic decisions towards long-term success. This is a mandatory module for all Queen Margaret Business School MSc courses. Much of the knowledge and skills developed in this module are transferrable and useful in a broad range of management functions.
• Professional Practice Internship (60 credits): Upon completion of the taught course above, you will also undertake an internship (60 credits), in an area where you plan to develop your career. Working with the Internship team, you will source and develop an internship in partnership with both the provider and the University. Within your internship you will be working towards the attainment of the internship learning aim and outcomes that you have set, and you will reflect upon your experience for your assessment. The internship experience is supported by an academic internship specialist and there is a taught programme that supports all students through this process.
• Dissertation (60 credits): In addition, you will also complete a Dissertation after the internship programme has been completed. For the dissertation, you will develop, plan and critically evaluate a substantial academic research project around a research topic of your choice, and in a relevant degree subject related area. It will be written up in the form of a 12,000-word dissertation.