Phoebe Penner, MSc student >>I've always started by looking at professors. We have MIT PhD students, we have people who work for the economic and social research, people who are from institutes, people who have worked in Oxford and Cambridge, the development programme here is insane. Ibrahim Jalloh, MSc student >>I feel like the atmosphere in the whole place is welcoming, so it feels like home, at Kent. Eugenie Dmitriev, MSc student >>I come from Switzerland, where the minimum requirement is Master's usually, but yes, the reason I came to England is because of the flexibility of the programme and the fact that it offers this conversion course here. Dr Zaki Wahhaj, Reader in Economics >>Here we have academics with a wide range of expertise, who are studying a variety of issues on developing countries. And that includes issues related to economic growth, to inequality, conflict, political economy, institutions, health and education in developing countries, and so on. And that combination of breadth and depth is almost unique to Kent at this point in time. Professor Miguel Leon-Ledesma, Director of the Macroeconomics, Growth and History Centre (MaGHic) >>Macroeconomics is very important for us to understand development. It's very important also for us to understand quantitative aspects of finance, for instance. Macroeconomics obviously speaks very closely to econometrics because obviously you want to build models that can explain data. And the way you test models is by using econometric methods. You will take macroeconomics modules in most of the Master's programmes that we offer at the School, and that's because macroeconomics is a very wide-ranging area that is going to be important in every single speciality that you take. Dr Andrey Launov, Senior Lecturer in Labour Economics and Director of Graduate Studies >>We are a very strong school. This School has an optimal mix, from my personal point of view, of established researchers and promising young career researchers. So this is a very vibrant and dynamic academic environment. And MSc students definitely feel that. Phoebe Penner, MSc student >>I thought I wanted to do something and having met new lecturers I actually realised it's not at all what I wanted to do. So I think the biggest thing they do is they help guide the way you think. They give you books and readings, and show you different avenues that you might not have seen, and similarly throughout, the employability has encouraged you to take jobs on the side, take jobs in the summer, you know, that kind of thing. Which, at the time, you think 'Oh, I donÕt want to do this application'. But looking back now, I have quite a solid CV that can support me. Eugenie Dmitriev, MSc student Mostly the reason I did economics as well is because I wanted to focus on trade and development, and most of the organisations are in Geneva, in Switzerland, like the World Trade Organization. So the aim would be to start targeting these companies and, obviously, most of them work with internships a lot at first and then obviously maybe move on to a financial analyst role, and that's what economics É the Master's in economics is going to give me and make that possible. Professor Alastair Bailey, Head of the School of Economics >>It's a school which is independent, so it's run by economists. I think for the Master's students, they're progressing through their studies, they've done an undergraduate where they've probably been in a class of hundreds. They're now in much smaller groups, doing much more specialist modules, and their interaction with staff is so much closer. Ibrahim Jalloh, MSc student >>My experience here at the School of Economics has been remarkable. I feel like if I ever have the opportunity again, I want to come back.