Honours

If you want to add a research component to your Doctor of Medicine or Bachelor of Biomedical Science degree, Monash Rural Health offers a one-year honours program.

Why do honours?

An honours degree prepares high achieving students for further study in a higher degree by research program. But even if that’s not what you have in mind, research training develops your ability to critically assess evidence that relates to your chosen clinical or scientific career.

What sort of projects are offered?

There’s a whole world of health-related research that takes place outside laboratories. The School of Rural Health offers a range of clinical or data-driven projects, for example:

  • Qualitative studies of attitudes toward healthcare among stakeholders, including patients, providers, educators, and government workers.
  • Clinical studies of the effectiveness of treatment programs, medical education and training programs.
  • Health data-driven studies of demographic and socioeconomic factors affecting rural communities.

Explore our current projects

Hear from our students

Tran Hoang

Tran Hoang

"The one-on-one mentorship provided by my supervisor in honours year was incredibly helpful. His thoughtful reading of my work, challenging questions and suggestions, and consistent encouragement gave me faith in my work and ability to carry out research."

Read Trang's profile
Georgia Maroske

Georgia Maroske

“The experience developed my ability to find relevant research papers and critically appraise these. Also, I improved my academic writing and ability to refine an important issue into a succinct summary. I appreciated the opportunity to understand the career pathways of the doctors I spoke with, and I hope to do further study or research in breastfeeding.”

Read Georgia's profile

Nathan Dalton

“I have gained many skills throughout the Honours year; conducting a literature review, data cleaning, data preparation using R, writing a thesis and manuscript for submission to a scholarly journal, just to mention a few. These will be extremely useful skills to have going into my future career, as I can continue to conduct research and won't have to learn how to do all these essential skills 'on the job'!”

Read Nathan's profile

Who is eligible to apply to do honours?

Bachelor of Biomedical Science (Hons)

You can apply for entry into the Bachelor of Biomedical Science honours degree after you successfully complete your Bachelor of Biomedical Science degree as long as you also meet the entry requirements. The Biomedical Science honours year combines coursework and supervised research.

Bachelor of Medical Science (Hons)

Students in the Doctor of Medicine degree can intermit for one year after you successfully complete at least three years of your MD. The faculty BMedSc (Hons) webpage gives details of the process. During that year, you’ll complete a supervised research project.

Where do I find details of projects and supervisors?

Explore our current projects

We are also open to discussing particular projects that interest you even if they’re not listed there.

We encourage you to contact potential supervisors directly to discuss projects and the timing and options for starting honours research.

Alternatively, you can talk to Dr David Reser our honours coordinator: david.reser@monash.edu or +61 3 9902 7393