I’ve been asked a handful of questions about studying Design Engineering at Imperial recently: what the workload is like, what it’s like living in central London, whether it’s what I expected, whether I’d rather have studied somewhere else, and what I want to do with it. Rather than answer them one at a time, here are my thoughts in one place.
I’m obligated to say that some of the following opinions may be subject to change as I enter Year 2.
Workload
Next term (Term 3 of Year 1) I’ll have 19 hours of classes per week, up from 16.5 last term. That’s a tad below some other courses, like Physics or Aeronautical Engineering, which I think is partly owing to our greater emphasis on project-based learning over the lecture hall. For reference, last term we had three ‘big’ projects and three ‘big’ exams.
The ‘real’ workload on top of that is subjective. Very broadly, I’d sort everyone into three buckets:
- The perfectionists: set on getting an A+ in every single piece of work. They attend every lecture and spend just as long in the library afterwards. Their workload is intense and dominates everything else.
- The experience maximisers: at least in first year, set on making the most of the ‘uni experience’ through socials, sports and societies. They’ll skip lectures that ‘aren’t important’ and are busy day to day, just in a different way.
- The side-projecters: the bucket I align with most. A lot of time goes into side projects, with some missed lectures, some societies and socials, and a bit of continuous study through term, while leaning on the breaks to properly learn the content before exams.
Most people are a mix of all three, to varying levels of intensity. For me, the workload is fine overall: busy, but not all-consuming.
Living in Central London
While Imperial is ‘central’, it isn’t central in the way UCL is. We’re bordered by the museums to the south and Hyde Park to the north, so the immediate area is quite peaceful compared to the shopping streets and offices surrounding UCL.
It’s a two-sided coin. On one hand, I love the architecture. Not so much Imperial’s own (though the Design Engineering building is beautiful), but the history of Exhibition Road itself (look up ‘Albertopolis’). On the other hand, most of the city’s startup scene is concentrated further east, so it’s easier to meet people for coffee if you’re based near UCL.
Either way, living in London puts you far closer to the startup scene, and everything else the city has to offer, than you’d be in Oxford or Cambridge. It’s expensive to live here wherever you end up, though anyone coming from Dublin will be used to that.
Is It What I Expected?
Yes and no. I expected the course to deliver a combination of creative design and rigorous engineering teaching, and in that sense Year 1 has delivered this in spades. The projects are quite open-ended. There is no textbook to look toward for definitive study material beyond looking at what worked previously (which often means looking back at portfolio PDFs from last year’s cohort) and trying to match or exceed their standard or general vibes. Care is certainly rewarded and can be instantly recognised when comparing side by side. Though tasteful & justifiable care is even better.
As for modules and Imperial itself, the teaching in my maths and materials/manufacturing modules has been world class. Professors like Sam Cooper and Billy Wu speak with the eloquence you might find in a well-scripted YouTube video essay, except these guys do it on the fly in front of a live audience (us), day in, day out. Computing, and a couple of others, have been good, but only that. I personally think the way that module is taught will be updated in years to come to better reflect our AI age. I’d put little to no emphasis on syntax, and much more on systems thinking and data flow theory. Or simply how large codebases are maintained and run in large organisations. This is information that no individual or group will ever stumble across during one of our coursework projects, and it is always one of the most interesting immediate learnings for anyone who interns at a real software company.
More broadly, I feel Imperial cares far more about its research and investing in it than it does about its building exteriors or lecture theatres.
My Take on Design Engineering Principles
Design Engineering Principles (DEP) had a mixed reception amongst my year group. I disagree with many of my peers, though, and think the module is an excellent introduction to what makes Design Engineering different to a traditional Mechanical or Chemical Engineering school of thought. The uncertainty of the creative process is quite a novelty compared to the closed-loop nature of learning regular logic-based content.
Several frameworks have been developed that attempt to act as bridges between these two schools of thought by applying logic to the creative process. Frameworks like ‘The Double Diamond’ or IDEO’s five stages (‘Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test’) come to mind. We humans like order and predictability, but it’s learning to be comfortable with the messy middle that DEP promotes quite well. This is reflected in the lecture content. Rather than a sequence of steps and rules to learn for reproduction in the submission, the professors provide creative kindling to a (hopefully alight) fire in the mind, exposing us to many concepts, designers, artefacts, trends and disruptive products through the lecture series. Sure, many of these can be called into question for their relevance to a ‘Shoe Project’, yet to do so is to miss the broader picture: it is said that to become a great designer, you must tune your sporadic creative muscles into a consistently performing living organism.
Again, this is not to say there is a step-by-step set of instructions where, on the last page of the manual, ‘creativity’ has been performed. Neither is it to say you must wait for creativity to strike, like Neolithic farmers hoping the gods provide a good harvest. Instead, and most fundamentally, Design Engineering Principles teaches just that: the principles. That is to put oneself into the climate, or conditions, that will help guide creativity into something reproducible on a consistent basis.
Would I Rather Have Studied Somewhere Else?
I’d have liked to apply to MIT or Stanford, mainly for the enormous funding they have to work on interesting projects. But the UK has real advantages too: London is Europe’s tech hub, the country has a long history of innovation in design, tuition fees are far cheaper, and I’m closer to family in Ireland.
For a sense of scale, here are some rough annual budget figures:
- MIT: ~£4.78 billion, with ~£2.1 billion on research
- Cambridge: ~£2.66 billion, with ~£605 million on research
- Imperial: ~£1.39 billion, with ~£396 million on research (though nearly all of it goes to STEM)
I chose to apply to Imperial over Cambridge because I thought it would offer more opportunities in university-adjacent things: companies, founders, events and the general buzz. I can’t say it’s been ‘better’ than what Cambridge would have offered in that regard, but being in London hasn’t disappointed me at all.
What Do I Want to Do With It?
In industry, ‘design engineer’ carries a wide range of meanings. In tech, it often describes a UX/UI designer: someone who makes the product feel nice to use. Imperial’s Design Engineering course is more a blend of mechanical and electronic engineering, with some product design and software mixed in. I’m personally more interested in this second meaning (I’ve written more about it in What is a Design Engineer?).
One area where this style of engineer fits well is humanoid robotics. There, the design of the motors and sensors directly shapes the form factor of the body, which in turn shapes what the robot can do and how marketable it is. You need a team of people who can look at the entire product and understand the trade-offs in each area. That team often doesn’t have the time, or the specialised knowledge, to solve day-to-day issues within individual subassemblies. Equally, the experts in, say, magnetic fibre design for touch sensing don’t have the time or breadth of skills to understand how their choices might affect the alloy used in a leg joint.
Both teams need each other to perform as a collective. I lean towards the design engineering side because I’m interested in twenty different fields, but lack the attention to pick just a couple and go really deep.
Thank you for reading! May the great design winds ever be blowing in your favour.