What are your interests in aerospace? Formula 1, space, aeroplanes?
If it's space, then choose Southampton 100%, they have a lot of space related modules and projects compared to Bristol. Bristol almost does no space related projects (atleast a year ago when I visited and asked). Both uni's have great links to industry, so it doesn't mean if you go to Bristol you have less chance if getting into space industry.
Do you like a big city or a small-ish one?
Bristol is quite big compared to Southampton I think
Would you like to take a year abroad in a different country whilst you're studying here or you don't mind?
Bristol offers a year abroad in 3rd year to over 150 universities world wide that you can go to which is amazing, Southampton kinda does it but with fewer universities, and it's only a semester long instead of a year.
I was in your position last year and to be fair, you can't go wrong with both universities, the one thing that attracted me to Bristol is the year abroad and for Southampton it was the course content, since I want to go into space industry, I didn't wanna give up such great content Southampton has in space related things. Since I'm at Southampton, I can only talk about it, it is very hands on, even first year, we've done about 2 projects already, one where we had to make a spoiler for formula 1 car, even though we haven't done fluid mechanics, we still had to use the simulation on the softwares to access the performance of our wing. We also do a lot of computer related stuff, like programming. The way engineering is headed knowing computer programming will take you to a lot of places. Even in our design module where we're meant to draw stuff and model with computers we use programming, such as today we were learning the theory of bezier curves and we a few projects coming up where we have to write computer code to generate shape of Aerofoil in Python and export those points into a CAD software to do fluids simulations on, I find those kind of stuff interesting, the fact that we're always applying what we learn in lectures in projects.
I think both uni's are great but since I go to Southampton I'm probably biased but I think Southampton suited me more in terms of interests. So I'll recommend looking on the course pages and seeing which one you enjoy more. For example Soton does propulsion and Bristol does vibrations in second year. Not to say that you won't learn propulsion a at Bristol and vibrations at Soton but one uni will focus more on the other.
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