Professor Richard King, Professor of Buddhist and Asian Studies: Religious Studies is a multi-disciplinary subject. It enables you to study the phenomenon of religion from a variety of different perspectives. 

Sophie Williams, student in Religious Studies: I chose to study religion purely because I was so interested in the world around me and understanding different cultures and people.

Professor Richard King: Asian Studies is a form of area studies and it is a degree which gives you the opportunity to explore the variety of Asian cultures and civilisations, both historically and in their contemporary manifestations. You can study Asian Studies in combination with a variety of different subjects across the humanities. 

Sophie Williams: I chose to study at the University of Kent because it had an absolutely amazing Religious Studies course on offer. I absolutely love being in Canterbury and the university itself has a really friendly and lovely campus and I thought I would be really happy here, which I am.

Professor Richard King: I chose to come to Kent for a number of reasons, one because of the quality of the teaching staff. Also, because of the research reputation of my colleagues. Many of them are international leaders in their field and I think it's a really important part of the educational experience to be taught by people who are really at the cutting edge of their discipline.

Sophie Williams: The best part of my course has probably been the variety, being able to study a range of religions and different cultures and also the variety of module courses that you can really go into in depth. So studying things from Christianity to Islam and then to Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, which was absolutely essential and really well taught so it gave me a perfect foundational knowledge.

Professor Richard King: Asian Studies generally is seen as a form of social scientific study, but at Kent we are pioneering an approach which combines both social scientific and humanities approaches. The idea being to give students a much greater understanding of some of the cultural and interpretative challenges.

Sophie Williams: After my degree in Religious Studies I would be really interested in going into secondary school teaching. I feel that the university has really set me up for being a really good teacher, being able to give my knowledge onto other people, that really really excites me. Otherwise I would be really interested in carrying on doing postgraduate study, doing a Master's and continuing my study here at Kent. 

Professor Richard King: We have students that go on to work in a variety of different fields from banking and finance, to social work, to teaching, to all kinds of different areas. Anyone who does a degree in that subject develops a real ability to understand different points of view, to analyse them critically. We are not about just presenting people's ideas and not asking difficult questions about them, we do ask those questions, but we are also about understanding, understanding different points of view. I think that is increasingly an important virtue and skill to have in today's world.