Whenever possible, teachers in the School of Mathematics give priority to close supervision: small-group work, individual tuition, rapid and personalised feedback on activities, active participation of students in the School’s teaching decisions. All the courses in the programme contribute to the acquisition of skills such as the capacity for abstract thinking and for reasoning. Other skills (aptitude for communication, independent learning, document research) are especially exercised in seminars specific to the focuses (where students are responsible for work progress), in work linked to the preparation of the dissertation and in the dissertation activity (the Thesis Tutorial, which specifically concentrates on scientific communication in English). The interdisciplinary character of the programme is reinforced by the presence in the options of courses taken from the Masters programmes in physics, in statistics and biostatistics, in actuarial science and in applied mathematics.
Students in the research focus may take introduction to research courses in neighbouring universities in order to learn about mathematical research subjects that are not offered by UCL. An additional teaching module in disciplines other than mathematics is possible for students in the teaching focus.