Engineering Design

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Engineering Design is a multi-disciplinary degree run by the University of Bristol. This highly successful programme educates and trains students for future leadership roles in industry.

1 History
2 Students
3 The Degree
4 Accreditation
5 The Royal Academy of Engineering Leadership Award
6 Website
7 External links

[edit] History

The programme was inspired by a team of leading industrial specialists from the Royal Academy of Engineering. Its development has been closely supported and sponsored by twelve top engineering companies. As a result, graduates of this programme are highly valued in the employment market.

[edit] Students

Students wishing to join this degree programme must exhibit great potential, with the desire to work on and eventually lead challenging large-scale projects that have significant impacts on society. These future leaders in engineering design will therefore need to learn about a broad range of issues including the social, economic and legal mechanisms that bring about change, as well as the effects of engineering systems on the environment. They must also be excellent at communicating their ideas and understand the full context in which engineering takes place. Only then can they graduate and lead the most important projects in the world.

Students in the past have turned down offers from Oxbridge just to attend this industry renowned programme.

[edit] The Degree

The full name of the degree is "MEng Engineering Design with Study in Industry". This title is a bit misleading, as the programme itself has little to do with any design aspects at all. Apart from a yearly "design" project, which similar ones are also run by other engineering courses at the university, there doesn't seem to be significant design elements in the programme to justify its name. In addition to this, Engineering Design students appear to have even less CAD training hours than other engineering disciplines, but this of course may be attributed to their innate abilities as well as their very demanding timetable. The reasons for this illogical choice of degree title are unknown to anyone except the course director and founder, Mr Jon Sims Williams.

A major component of this Engineering Design programme involves a year out on an industrial placement with one of the twelve partner companies. This allows students to gain an in-depth understanding of the industry and also an appreciation of how their their academic studies are relevant within real engineering. Students in the past are known to bring great benefits to the companies they work for during this year: one student in particular initiated a proposal to improve the efficiency of a manufacturing process that saved his company £1.5 million a year. And it is therefore unsurprising that almost all return to university with a firm job offer already in place.

[edit] Accreditation

The Engineering Design course is unique in that it is accredited by all the major engineering institutions in the UK. This means that graduates of this course can join any or all of the following institutions:

The Royal Aeronautical Society
The Institution of Civil Engineers
The Institution of Structural Engineers
The Institution of Mechanical Engineers
The Institution of Engineering and Technology
The Institution of Engineering Designers

[edit] The Royal Academy of Engineering Leadership Award

Since the inception of the degree programme, at least one student every year from the Engineering Design course has won the prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Leadership Award. This award is extremely sort after by undergraduates across the country as there are only 20 places each year. Winners of this award undertake an accelerated personal development programme, fast-tracking them to executive careers within the engineering industry (and not to mention the £5,500 award they each receive).

[edit] Website

Despite being a world leading programme, the Engineering Design course has been known for its notoriously problematical website. It is littered with broken links, the search bar never seems to work and its webpages rarely fit onto ones screen – often resulting in the need to scroll to the bottom of the webpage before information can be found. This however doesn’t seem to get noticed by staff or students, as computers in the university's engineering faculty are uniquely configured to cater for this peculiar formatting.