Title: Heather Douglas – 2nd Year BEng Electronic Engineering student
Duration: 4.29 mins
Begins
Hello, I’m Heather Douglas and I’m a 2nd Year BEng Electronic Engineering student at the University of Birmingham.
I picked Electronic Engineering as my degree choice because I did Maths, Physics and Electronics at A-level and I’d never done electronics before but it’s just so interesting as a subject. The course that I’m doing is very broad, so first year you’ll do digital logic, you’ll do programming, you’ll do all aspects of engineering – you’ll do your power electronics - and then as you get into second and third year there’s more room to specialise and more room to kind of do what you enjoy and do what you like.
The course itself is very focused on being a practical engineer. The second year you do a lot of lab work and you’ll be encouraged very heavily to keep a very good lab book. Lots and lots of team work as well, so it’s a really really good course for setting you up to do industrial work, to work in engineering. As part of the second year you have to do a robot project which is quite stressful actually, but very very fun. You’re given a box of wheels and parts and motors and then you have to make something like this - this is one of last year’s – and it’s got to follow a line and carry an egg without dropping it. So you’ve got eleven weeks in a team to design and then to build a robot and at the end have it work, hopefully! Yeah, it’s all coming together now.
I actually had the opportunity this year to go to China with the university. We went over to Beijing the first week sight-seeing, which was a nice holiday, and then the second week we met a lot of Chinese students that join our course in the second year.
I picked the University of Birmingham originally based on the league tables and it being a red brick university which means it’s one of the top in the country, but I also picked Birmingham for the city as well. Because it’s a big city it’s central, there’s good transport links and then what really made me put Birmingham as my first choice was when I went on the open day visit I met the staff, I met some of the students and it was really well organised. The staff were friendly and I thought that’s where I want to study. I really like being at university because, although engineering’s quite a demanding course in the amount of hours you do, you still have Wednesday afternoons off, weekends and you get a lot of freedom to do what you want to do and when and yeah, student life is the best life.
There's opportunities to do a lot of extracurricular activities at Birmingham, so I’m review editor for the Science magazine which is very fitting with my course and last year I did karate as well, but Birmingham has a great mix for sports and also societies. You can get involved in almost anything you want to.
When I graduate I’m still considering what I want to do because there are so many options for an engineer but I’ve been offered a PhD from one of the lecturers here at the university which has a year’s study in China, which I am considering quite heavily.
I would say for any student, regardless of what university you want to come to, you need to come and actually visit the university, come and see the staff, come and see the students, because there will always be student helpers. See what they think and see how you feel at the university, see how you fit in and whether it’s the place for you.
Engineering is a very male dominated arena but for me, I don’t think that that’s a bad thing and I don’t think that women should be put off from coming into engineering. There is a lot of positive discrimination towards women and a lot of events are run through the university targeted towards women in science and engineering and there’s just been a society which was set up called Women in Science and Engineering with talks from employers and people coming in to look for women who are graduating and put them into jobs. So for me, being a woman in engineering is an advantage and I think there definitely should be more women coming in.
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