Combined Studies

Combined studies at degree level is a model of education that invites you to design your own academic programme, selecting from across the university's curriculum to create a degree that reflects your particular interests, strengths, and ambitions. Rather than committing to a single discipline or a pre-determined pairing, you build a bespoke combination that suits who you are and what you want to achieve, with the guidance and structure of an accredited programme to ensure intellectual coherence and academic rigour.

At Heriot-Watt University, this four-year full-time BSc provides exactly this flexibility, allowing you to draw from a wide range of subjects across the university to create a genuinely customised degree. The programme is built around your individual interests, career aspirations, and academic strengths, and the university's support structures ensure that your choices are academically ambitious and professionally relevant. Heriot-Watt has particular strengths in engineering, science, business, languages, and design, and combined studies allows students to bring disciplines together that might not normally be available as a pre-designed joint degree.

With a typical entry tariff of 152 UCAS points, the programme expects strong academic preparation.

Graduates from combined studies programmes are as varied as their degrees. The specific career destinations depend on the combination chosen, but the core advantage of a combined studies degree is that it can be tailored to a particular career goal or sector that a standard programme does not serve, or to an unusual combination of interests that creates a distinctive and genuinely differentiated graduate profile. Postgraduate study options depend equally on the combination and the career direction you have pursued.

The flexibility of the programme is its greatest strength, and the most successful students are those who use it purposefully.