Engineering New Degrees

Following consultation with schools and employers, new undergraduate degrees have recently been introduced in Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering and Geoinformatics. The aim is to attract the brightest students into an engineering education and to produce graduates capable of clear thinking, good communication skills and managing large-scale engineering projects, comfortable with complex inter-disciplinary issues, not afraid to innovate, and equipped to take on challenges beyond the vocational boundaries traditionally associated with engineering degrees. This paper describes innovations central to the new programmes and the challenges faced in introducing them: admissions criteria have been ratcheted up, interview procedures revolutionised, the academic year re-shaped around four major open-ended projects, key roles found for academic staff previously detached from undergraduate teaching, the syllabus balanced between analytical methods and the context in which they can be applied, the teaching programme broken into four self-contained quarters, and assessment brought into a single 4-unit course