Engineering Science

Engineering is one of the larger subjects, or ‘schools’ offered at Somerville. 

The course is centrally organized and the college has the great advantage of being only just across the road from the Engineering Department where all the lectures and practicals take place.

Teaching

Engineering is one of the broadest sciences at Oxford. At Oxford, there are six major schools: Biomedical, Chemical, Civil, Electrical, Information and Mechanical, each with their own specialist knowledge. 

In an average week, an Oxford engineering student can expect about ten lectures and two tutorials, as well as up to five hours a week of practical work in your first and second years, and one day a week on your group project in your third year. Tutorials are organised primarily within College but the range of subjects is wide and you will be taught by tutors from outside College in the later part of the course. In the 3rd and 4th year there is a mix of project work and tutorial classes organised within the Department. The specialist options are taught by the experts in the field, whatever you choose. Your fourth year will centre on an individual research project which takes approximately two and a half days a week. At the end of your 4 years, you will graduate with an MEng.

Somerville has two full time Tutorial Fellows in Engineering, Professor Noa Zilberman and Professor Richard Stone. Noa is a network-hardware researcher, focusing on achieving the sustainable future of computing through integration of micro-level architectures and macro level, large scale networked-systems. Recently named a Google Research Scholar 2021, Noa introduces her research in this blog for the Somerville website: https://www.some.ox.ac.uk/news/reimagining-the-future-of-computing-infrastructure/. Richard is a distinguished academic and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, whose research interests lie in the modelling and measurement of combustion and heat transfer in spark ignition engines; cryogenic systems; and the measurement of laminar burning velocities in zero gravity. In 2021, he was made a Fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineering in recognition of his lasting positive impact on the mobility industry.

Somerville is a very conveniently located college if you want to study Engineering, as we are just across the road from the Engineering Department where all of your practicals and lectures will take place. Our students love the convenience of being able to walk back and forth between their classes in the Department, lunch in hall at College, back to their practicals, then home to Somerville again for a tutorial and so on.

I loved studying engineering at Somerville. Not only are the tutors extremely helpful and supportive, but the engineering building is about a minute away – which made me the envy of my peers in other colleges!

Eleanor Thompson (2017, Engineering)

Community

Engineering is one of the bigger subjects offered at Somerville, and we seek to make offers to six undergraduates each year. The College has made a particular effort to foster engineering since appointing our first lecturer in the subject in 1985. Somerville admitted only female students until 1994, and we continue to be passionate about encouraging women into Engineering here – women such as Amelia Gould, an engineer for BAE Systems and recipient of the 2017 WISE Woman in Industry Awards. You can watch Amelia talking about her engineering career here.  

Our college exists to include the excluded, so we seek to provide a supportive environment for people of all backgrounds and those who have had limited experience of the subject before coming up to Oxford.

Whenever people ask me what it was like studying Engineering in Oxford, I tell them the main thing is that, if you do engineering in France, you stay just with engineers and have engineering conversation, but here you are in a College with people doing fantastic work in all these different subjects and it opens your mind like nothing else.

Adrien Geiger (2007, Engineering), GRoup Sustainability Officer, L’Occitane

Next Steps

The engineering sector contributes 26% of the UK’s GDP, and you will find strong employment opportunities on graduating across a variety of organisations in the UK and abroad. Some Oxford Engineering graduates also go on to careers in other sectors, including finance, the Civil Service, and consultancy.

To find out more about the course and applications, have a look at the University’s application site for Engineering.