Creative Writing and Media with Foundation Year

Creative writing and media studies might seem like distinct pursuits, but they illuminate each other in important ways. Creative writing requires you to understand how stories and arguments are constructed, what makes language work on a reader, and how form and content interact. Media studies gives you the analytical tools to understand the platforms, institutions, and cultural contexts in which writing circulates.

Studying them together produces a graduate who can both create and critically analyse, who writes with craft and understands the landscape in which that writing lives.

York St John University's four-year programme includes a foundation year as part of its structure, along with a sandwich placement year, a year abroad, and a work placement component, giving you an unusually wide set of structured opportunities to develop your skills and gain professional and international experience. You will work on fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and scriptwriting, developing your own voice as a writer through workshops, tutorials, and sustained practice. Alongside this, you will investigate the wider media landscape: how media industries operate, how content is produced and distributed, how audiences engage with different forms, and what questions of representation and power arise in media production and consumption.

The combination builds both creative confidence and analytical rigour, and the structured placements mean you will graduate with professional experience as well as a strong portfolio of creative and critical work. York St John's strong commitment to supporting student growth, as reflected in the programme's own description, runs through the degree.

Career paths for graduates include work in publishing, journalism, copywriting, content creation, advertising, broadcasting, digital media, public relations, and communications. Some move into teaching creative writing or media studies, or into arts administration and cultural programming. Others pursue postgraduate study in creative writing, media, film, or cultural studies.

The skills developed on this programme, which combine imaginative and analytical thinking with professional media literacy, are valued across the creative economy.