University of Bristol

The University of Bristol is a civic university in Bristol, southwest England. It opened in 1876 as University College, Bristol, which admitted women on the same terms as men, and received a royal charter in 1909. It grew into a multi-site university with teaching in Clifton and the city center and a veterinary campus at Langford. It is a red-brick civic university rather than a collegiate foundation.

Six faculties cover Arts, Engineering, Health Sciences, Life Sciences, Science, and Social Sciences and Law. Graduate work is associated with aerospace and mechanical engineering, veterinary science, medicine and dentistry, geography and earth sciences, chemistry, and law. The Bristol Veterinary School at Langford, the Medical School, and the Cabot Institute for the Environment are the units graduate students most often join. Clinical training uses hospitals in the city and region.

About 30,000 students enroll, of whom roughly a quarter are postgraduates and more than a quarter are international, from well over 100 countries. Faculty number in the low thousands. Physicist Paul Dirac studied here before Cambridge; other alumni include novelist Angela Carter and actor Simon Pegg.

Graduate study centers on taught master's degrees (MSc, MA, MRes), research master's degrees, and PhDs, plus professional routes in veterinary medicine, medicine, dentistry, and law. Doctoral work follows the British supervision model. The year runs autumn to summer across three teaching terms. Support includes UK Research Council studentships and university scholarships. Students live in a compact city on the River Avon, with the main precinct on the Clifton hillside.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, University of Bristol lists 144 graduate programs across 42 subjects: 117 master's programs and 27 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in law, electrical engineering and earth & environmental sciences. University of Bristol holds rank 94 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.