Returning to university for an MSc in Criminology in 2024, Joel had a clear idea how he wanted to progress his career.

Studying part-time alongside his day job as a detective with Avon and Somerset Police allowed him to prepare for a new role with the University of the West of England as a lecturer.

We caught up with Joel to chat through his experience on the course.

What brought you to Bath for a criminology course?

I have two separate undergraduate degrees – one in philosophy and one in law. For my law degree, I always found the criminal law aspect of things the most interesting. The stated cases always stuck because they had a bit of a history and story behind them.

After a very brief dalliance as a family law paralegal, I then moved on to the Metropolitan Police for about a decade. I was a detective for the majority of my time there, and then transferred, probably again about a decade ago, to Avon and Somerset.

During that time, I started to provide a lot of different inputs to our training school, upskilling people in the roles above me, and doing ad hoc training for other units as well. I began to find that very interesting and much more enjoyable than my day-to-day job.

So, I decided that I wanted to go into more of a teaching and academic position, but I felt that I needed to crystallise and solidify my knowledge with a master's qualification.

I’m actually from Bath originally, so it was nice to move back for work. I visited the campus a couple of times when I was at school, but, growing up, I had wanted to move further away for a while.

Coming back to Bath to do a master’s was kind of aspirational as well. The quality of teaching, the rankings and status that Bath has made it a nice little package of reasons.

What are your favourite elements of the course?

I study part-time and the structure of the course fit around my schedule quite nicely with reduced work hours.

As a detective who's dealt with these things first-hand, I was always going to find things like homicide and state crime interesting. But there was certainly one core area that I wanted to do, which was to learn research methodology, because that was just something that I was completely lacking. And I noticed that Bath had quite a lot of innovative and new methods for doing research, including ethnographic approaches.

Ethnography is certainly a big part of the academic skill set here at Bath. As my work experience was basically talking to people, observing what they were saying, how they were behaving, and writing it down and reporting it, I hadn't realised that I'd actually been doing ethnography in one way or the other for the last two decades. As a result, I got quite a high grade in it, but I did find it interesting that there was an entire classification of research methodology that I hadn't realised existed.

Being a bit older and studying part-time, I and a few fellow students in a similar situation have naturally not had the typical university experience, but you could expect that at this point in your career. You’ve got other factors going on, like balancing work and family life. But everyone on the course, no matter their age or background, has been lovely and very engaging.

The lecturers are absolutely fantastic, and they all have their unique skill set that they apply to how they run the modules. The support that I’ve had from our Director of Studies and my academic advisor has been fantastic.

What are you looking at in your dissertation and why is it important to you?

Over the last couple of decades, I've dealt with pretty much every type of crime you can imagine. One of the things I personally felt quite critical of was the possible cause of certain violent crimes. I personally felt that sometimes, when officers went and did some sort of major ‘day of action’, where they got rid of a load of people involved in things like drug supply off the streets, there seemed to be an uptick in violent crime afterwards.

At the time, it made sense to me because we removed key controllers and players in an extremely lucrative market, and there's always a demand for these things. Therefore, people are going to fight to have control over that. But essentially, my own personal friction was that I got frustrated with dealing with the aftermath.

I wanted to look at this analytically and critically as well, with the ultimate aim to make policing more strategic, and really think about who to target, why and when. And whether there might be a better way of choosing when to intervene and when police action is potentially going to cause more people to maybe lose their lives or draw more vulnerable people into the drug market.

What’s next for you?

I’ve put myself under a bit of pressure at the moment to write up my dissertation in three weeks while preparing for my new job. I have resigned from the police, and I've now got a job offer at UWE in Bristol as a lecturer in policing. I’ll be able to give a lot of input on future police training, planning lessons, marking, the whole teaching aspect of things.

This is all off the back of me doing this study, so I'm very pleased with the course because it's basically allowed me to do exactly what I wanted to do.

What’s your advice for anyone interested in studying criminology?

This essentially applies to any postgraduate course, but: have an objective in mind – a long-term goal that you wish to work towards so you can really decide whether any particular course is suitable for you.

If you’ve already been working for some time, have had a bit of experience and an understanding of where you’d like your career trajectory to go, returning to university can seem like a big step but you’ll really know what you want to get out of it.

Our academic advisors were brilliant and supportive, so have those early conversations about your research and career options with them. Be open to the idea of networking early on as well; it’s a key part of the experience and it helps you get more of an idea how the job market works.