Do the UK's top 5 unis care about EPQ for engineering ?

(Original post by artful_lounger)
Evaluating sources is incredibly important for any academic degree, including engineering. Do you not understand how academic research works, or appreciate that you might need to do just that when preparing e.g. a market research report in an engineering firm? Engineering departments, especially the "top" engineering departments, don't give a toss whether you can "build things".

They care about how well you can do maths and physics and apply science generally to unfamiliar problems, and how well you can write this up in an academic manner. It sounds like your idea of what engineering constitutes, particularly at the "top" universities (which are overwhelmingly science and research oriented) is extremely unrealistic.

(Original post by lhh2003)
Yes but the sources I will be evaluating are about biased journalism, most of the work goes into this, so there is nothin to do with engineering. English language literally covers this. I find it hard to accept that they wouldn't give a toss what you can build. I have seen interviews for Cambridge where a student helped build a device to measure the speed of electrons or something along those lines, and the interviewer was very intrigued by it. They didn't question her "evaluation skills" one bit.

(Original post by artful_lounger)
The interviewer wouldn't have been interested in the applicants building skills, they would've been interested in their ability to apply their knowledge of A-level Physics and Maths in a novel way.

Also just because you might not think it's relevant, doesn't mean that it isn't - even if your EPQ is on a non-engineering topic, the transferable skills you gain are the point of it and what is going to be relevant in your degree. I would note however even if you did an EPQ in an engineering area it's unlikely to be of any particular note as far as admissions go, other than generally demonstrating your interest in the subject area (which you can do just as well by doing wider reading in your spare time). What would be relevant even in an engineering EPQ wouldn't be what you produced as a physical artefact, but how you applied your scientific knowledge in the production of it, what experimental testing you did and how you recorded and evaluated that.

You should do more research into and reading around what engineering at university (and as a profession) actually entails. It's not "making things", and in fact that side of engineering is more typically done for engineers by technicians and such working with them. Manufacturing engineers don't physically make things, for example - they design systems which allow the large scale manufacture of stuff. Mechanical design engineers don't make things as an end goal - they may make a prototype, but the goal is in designing the system using scientific principles in such a way that it a) works b) they have recorded what they did well enough for other people to replicate it and c) they can then upscale that for production, typically.

(Original post by lhh2003)
I have read that only 10% of mechanical engineers grads are actually employed as mechanical engineers.. is this true ?