Before commencing the MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies at the University of Oxford I was a practising lawyer but wanted to transition into academia. Within a month after graduating from the MSc course I was offered a full-time, permanent lectureship at the College of Law at the Australian National University (one of Australia's top law schools).

There are a few aspects of the MSc that helped me make this transition into my dream job so quickly and have influenced the way I approach research and teaching. One is the degree's focus on a specific field of study. Undertaking the MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies was more beneficial for me than completing a generic LLM or the BCL. It shows a commitment to a specific field of scholarship and this specialisation is essential for early career academics.

Second, the interdisciplinary focus of the degree has given me many more options for early career research. The degree provides exceptional course work-based training in qualitative and quantitative social science methodologies and I also had the opportunity to further develop my legal research skills through the individual research thesis. This array of skills development has opened up opportunities for me to conduct socio-legal research in the field of refugee studies as opposed to traditional, doctrinal legal scholarship.

Third, the RSC's emphasis on the need to produce scholarship that is both theoretically grounded as well as likely to have a real world impact has had a profound influence on the way that I teach. I similarly encourage my students of international human rights law to adopt a critical perceptive of human rights law and discourse that is grounded in a particular theoretical perspective and to use this to create ideas or platforms for legal and policy reform.