Engineering Science at Oxford Virtual Open Day: Current Engineering Science undergraduate student Felix describes his 3rd year experience
Third Year
"In third year, there is a lot more flexibility in what modules you study. There are some important compulsory modules on things like ethics, the environment, and safety, but more time is spent on your chosen modules. You choose 5 options on topics like materials science, biomedical engineering, electronics, software engineering, thermodynamics, and many more. You aren’t “pigeon-holing” yourself in a certain discipline as you’ll still take modules from across engineering disciplines, but you’ll be more focused on the parts you enjoy.
The biggest change in third year is the coursework. There is a small coding project, but a much larger group design project which runs through the year, where you get really stuck into the detail. Project areas range from prosthetic limbs to designing a bridge, and my project for the year was to design a particle monitor for use in CERN. You will spend time looking at the latest science on the subject, and then you decide on what areas you will work on to improve the existing technology or come up with a new idea. The majority of the time throughout the year is spent working on designs and simulating them in some way, be that in computational fluid dynamics or writing some of your own software, and at the end of it the team will propose a solution to the set problem and outline the work they have done on the design.
Through this design project you will see the interdisciplinary nature of engineering and apply the principles you have learnt in the first two years of study as well as teaching yourself some science. It will give you something great to talk about in a job interview as it is a chance to prove how good you are when faced with a highly technical problem in a practical setting."