How you will be taught
What is a typical university week like?
In the first three years you spend about ten hours a week in lectures, about six hours in laboratories and a further hour in a personal tutorial. A working week is roughly 30 hours, assuming a nine-to-five day, an hour a day for lunch and with Wednesday afternoons set aside for you to pursue leisure activities such as sport and hobbies. Private study in the library and project work will take up much of the rest of the week. As you can see whilst the life of an engineering student is exciting and interesting it is also very busy.
Although individual lectures are nominally an hour long, lecturers normally speak for 50 minutes leaving 10 minutes to allow for room changes. They also supplement their delivery using blackboards, overhead projectors and video projection. Sometimes printed notes are available, however, it is up to you to take your own notes and make full use of the lecture time.
A set of lectures in a particular subject, the associated laboratories, coursework and the inevitable examination, are known collectively as a unit. During the course unit some of the lecture slots will be used for examples classes. In these periods you will be able to practise problems, similar to those found in the examinations, with the guidance of the subject lecturer.
You will spend an average of six hours a week in laboratories. Here you will see how the theory outlined in the lectures can be applied in practical experiments. You will also gain experience in high-level language programming in Java and C/C++ and low-level programming in assembly language. The School has extensive computer facilities, clusters of PCs for program development and computer aided design, as well as supporting standard word-processing, spreadsheet and database packages. There is also a dedicated microcontroller development laboratory. A number of clusters of PCs around the campus are provided as general computing facilities by the university for its staff and students.
Most of the academic staff act as personal tutors to small group of students (5 or 6). Groups meet with their personal tutors for about an hour each week. The tutors have two roles, firstly to help with academic problems at the individual level and secondly to act as advisors on more general matters concerning life in a busy university.
Project work is a central theme running through all years of the programmes. You will build a microcontroller system as a project in the first year and then use it in the embedded systems group project in the second year. A substantial feature of the third year is the individual project which allows you to show innovation and application of the knowledge and techniques you have learned.
The MEng fourth year is different in style from the first three, units being allocated half a day (three consecutive hours) per week. The staff member responsible for the course unit decides not only the content but also how it will be delivered. For example, a course unit could start with a lecture for an hour, the class may do some research and return for the last hour to a seminar and discussion.
In industry and commerce it is more usual that a team of people work together on a project. Each of the team members is chosen for his or her particular expertise. In the fourth year of the MEng programme we give you experience of this as you will work on a team project with four or five other students. In the year as a whole your time will be divided equally between the academic units and the team project, the assessment of the team project contributes more than half the marks for the year.
In all years course units are assessed by coursework (laboratory reports and marked examples), project work and examinations. There are two examination periods, one after the Christmas vacation and the other in May/June. The type of assessment depends on the content of the course unit.