Laptop for Aerospace Engineering

Hi, I have just received a place studying Aerospace Engineering at the University of Nottingham. I have been awarded a grant from my college of about £500 to purchase a laptop to support my studies, and was wondering whether the workload on an aerospace course would be better served with a more powerful conventional laptop or with a 2 in 1 to allow me to take notes and draw diagrams and equations. I plan to spend over £500 and use the grant as a discount, and have a powerful enough desktop to run any CAD software. Any insight would be much appreciated!

Reply 1

UoNstudents

Official Rep

Hi @oscarconnolly!

Bear in mind this is personal opinion based on my experience in this course. If you can, try to aim for laptop that can have either dedicated GPU or a good integrated one along with +8GB RAM. There are of course other alternatives such as using the university-owned PCs at the Aerospace Design Studio (there is 100% chance you will be here) or the remote desktop. A laptop will give you more flexibility to work in your own terms. For reference, you will make use of the following programmes at some point during your studies: CATIA 3D Experience, Abaqus, ANSYS Fluids, MATLAB, etc.

I personally used a combination of laptop + tablet (or a plain notebook sometimes) for notetaking in general. But I would argue the laptop was the most important piece of equipment as you will be doing coursework, revision, research (potentially for your individual project) and so on with it.

I hope it helps,
Abian.