It’s going to be a stressful week. I predict that our concept report will be about two hundred pages long — and we’re only up to concept stage! There are five people sharing the workload in my group. It’s a good thing we’re all hard working… but I get the feeling that you wouldn’t survive to final year engineering without being hard working.

I think engineering is one of the most demanding university courses. Besides the technical difficulty of the subject matter, the demands it makes on your time and effort are disproportionately greater than the recognition that engineering students get. I have friends who do medicine — that’s probably the one course I’d say students get pushed harder than in engineering.

Still, I have time to get involved in clubs, have a social life and part time jobs. Nothing to complain about. The work is interesting and there is the security of studying a vocationally-oriented degree. There’s no need to feel sorry for engineering students — it’s the generalist degree students that I have the most sympathy for!

“So, you’re studying pure maths/philosophy/history/marketing… What are you going to do with that?”

Poor kids — they must be sick of answering that question!