MEng Electrical and Electronic Engineering with a Year Abroad

Every year I spent at Imperial I found unique and exciting for different reasons. In the first year you are slowly being immersed into the ideal world of EEE, getting a glimpse of the different topics and areas you can explore in the future. The second year, having learnt about the basic concepts, you dive into more detail and are taught new things. All topped up with a lot of laboratory exercises to build up on your understanding of the theory and group project experience in both years.

 Third year is the time when you first get to choose what you would really like to focus on. I enjoy a variety of topics, so I studied courses in Power, Control and Signal Processing. All of these cover a fairly wide area of applications in the industry. The first two terms provided me with a lot more in-depth knowledge in the topics of my choice and during the summer term I chose to do a group project, which focused on building a product for educational purposes.

The department and Imperial offered me the opportunity to study abroad for a year, so I spent my last year at University of California, Los Angeles. At UCLA I had the chance to explore not only the topics I liked further, but a vastly different education system. Differences included both major and minor things, such as exam preparation time, homework requirements, even the number of companies attending a careers fair and how they recruit, but most importantly the Electrical Engineering course.

 UCLA is on a quarter system, which means that there are final exams every 10 weeks, with no more than a weekend between the last lecture and the first exam. This, along with weekly deadlines, made each quarter a lot more intense than I had experienced before. At the same time, I realised that undergraduate students did not have the opportunity to spend nearly as much time in a lab as I did during my first 3 years, which made me more practically skilled than most of my classmates.

 UCLA’s Engineering school has a Smart Grid research centre that does a lot of work on electric vehicles and their integration into the power network. My final year project was around this topic and involved developing an algorithm such that a “dumb” charger was converted into a smart one and charging of vehicles at parking lots was made more efficient, by considering user preferences. This project gave me exposure to the Smart Grid community in the USA, complementing the already big names of the equivalent one that taught me in the UK.

 The year abroad for me was not just an opportunity to explore a new city or country, but more of a chance to dive deeper into the field I love, explore things from a different perspective, observe how other countries teach electrical engineering and form a well-rounded perspective of the engineering world. All of which set me on a path to become a globally engaged engineer. And it would have not been as enjoyable and productive if it was not for Imperial to prepare me and give me the opportunity for the year abroad.