Year 12s: what will be the first way you research your future options? >>

Which Uni?

Just wanted to hear some external opinions:

I've applied to Cambridge, Imperial, Southampton, Leeds and Nottingham for Mechanical Engineering (2016 entry)

I've been to all the open days, and at the moment I like Southampton and Nottingham the best, but I was wondering what current students thought about these five Unis? Any particularly good/bad things I should be aware of?

Thanks

Reply 1

bigboateng_

I am currently at Southampton Uni studying aerospace engineering but for first year we do the same 'fundamentals of engineering' as mech people so this is modules such as maths, thermodynamics&fluid mechanics, mechanics, design&computing. The mech people have one specialized module which I dont do, same for aero. I will say Southampton is a great uni especially for engineering, the course content is pretty tough but it's doable, from first week we dived straight into partial differentiation and what not. The course is also very practical, although in first year we haven't done any projects so far (although we build some stuff in first week) as we are still learning content but from second year going, there is lots of hands on projects, and these are not baby projects, some build 3d printers from scratch, autonomous robots etc. Talking about 3d printers, there is crap loads of them at southampton which students can use for free, so if you design a new phone cover, you can literally walk into the workshop on Wednesdays and 3d print. They recently build a new engineering campus (Boldrewood Campus) so the amount of equipment available more than doubled. There design studio's specifically for engineering students you can walk in almost any time of the day to do CAD work/programming. This also means that for experiments, there wont be 20 people cramped around equipment, out of all the experiments I've done there have been max 5 people using them. You also find out how the things you learn apply to real world too, for example we've doing maths and programming for about 6 weeks now and we started having lectures where we get showed how the maths and the program we write is used in real world so for example last week we learnt about something called Markov Chain which is a method which was used by Google search system when they first did, I found that lecture quite interesting and we were also showed how its used in engineering type applications. Without writing an essay in summary at southampton: Lots of resources available, lots of equipments for labs, everyone is hardworking (atleast most people) but its also fun. Lots of clubs in the city centre calm environment, havent seen any chavs around yet. lastly the course is ****king hard!!

if you need to know specific things, just reply/pm me

Reply 2

Original.Name

Original post by bigboateng_

if you need to know specific things, just reply/pm me

Wow, thanks for all that information, that's really helped me! I think Southampton was my favourite anyway, but it's great to hear so much from a current student. Thanks!

If i do think of anything else, i may well take you up on your offer of a pm :wink: