The Master of Lighting course is really available for anybody who wants to do lighting, has an interest in lighting in some form or other.  They may be in the manufacturing side of lamps, illuminaires, they may be a designer, may be an architect who looks at lighting in museums and art galleries, and it looks at the theatre lighting and the entertainment industry as well.

The graduate certificate is what we call the basics of lighting, where students just study enough to get a full rounded understanding of what’s involved in lighting.  The graduate diploma course that follows that is then a program of the applications of lighting – how do you apply it in all the different situations.  And then the final part of the program, the masters program part itself, is where students do the projects in areas that interest them specifically.

Lighting uses something like 20% of the earth’s electrical needs, and it’s a good opportunity to be able to reduce the energy usage of the world by choosing the right type of lights, energy efficient lights and we have some new energy efficient lights to work with these days, the LED product which has moved onto the market in the last five or ten years shows great promise in saving a lot of energy.

The vast majority of students that start our course get really excited about lighting the further into the program they get.  And a lot of them have come to me afterwards and say ‘I never knew there was so much to lighting until I started to do this program’. There are not a lot of lighting PhD’s out there in the world, and anyone with a PhD can be assured that they will be in demand. 

And if you’re interested in doing our lighting course, please feel free to talk to us, send us an email (lighting@qut.edu.au), we will be more than happy to answer your questions about the course, and we hope to see you here at QUT.