Modules you study in your 1st Year of Engineering (Part-1)

Hi! Welcome back to another blog! Hope you found my previous blog on the structure of 1 Year of Engineering at Warwick helpful! Today I am going to be talking to you about the different modules that you study in your 1 year of Engineering and include my experiences of them!

In your 1 Year of Engineering, everyone, regardless of what stream you chose to apply to Warwick, does the same 9 modules. I have broken down the modules into 2 blogs, this part will cover the first 4 modules and the next one will cover the rest 5. So let’s get started.

The modules that I studied are:

1. ES101: Introduction to Engineering, Professionalism, and Practice

This module almost feels like a mini-module as you don’t have to spend much time on it since it deals with subjects which are not related to core engineering but are still immensely important. You will learn about plagiarism, health and safety, ethics, equality and diversity, how to write your CV, how to write a Cover Letter, and how to give a presentation among other topics. For my year, there were no labs or seminars for this module. However, we had 2 assignments, the first was to write our CV and Cover Letter for a job and we were then graded on it and given feedback. The second was an activity where we had to explore the stream options available to us, reflect on our experiences, and try to choose a few streams that we are most interested in or that would align with our skill.

• ES190: Dynamics and Thermodynamics

This module is split into 2 topics which are covered over 5 weeks each- Dynamics and Thermodynamics. Most of the topics taught first revise fundamentals taught in A-levels and then go a bit beyond them. The thermodynamics part does have a lot of content delivered each week so it is often seen that students fall behind on it. However, the content is not very difficult and thus can be easily done if given the time. Whereas on the other hand I believe the Dynamics part had lesser content but was more intellectually challenging and harder to grasp. In my year, we had a couple of labs for this module which were the Inertia lab and the Energy Balance lab. We had our final exam for this module in the exam season of 3 term.

• ES191: Electrical and Electronic Circuits

This module starts off with revision of concepts you study in your A-level physics such as laws of electricity , magnetism, nodal and mesh analysis, but quickly goes on into new topics with quite detail such as Thevenin and Norton Circuits, AC Circuits, Diodes, Transistors, and Amplifiers. The content is fairly hard but the lecturers are pretty good so it is easy to understand if you put in some effort. We had a few labs in which we experimentally verified the various laws and rules that we studied in theory. We had our final exam for this module in the exam season of 3 term.

• ES192: Engineering Design

This was probably one of my favourite and most fun modules in 1 Year. We started of by learning CAD which is basically 3D modelling of objects which I was completely new to, but the lecturers and content is structured in a great way which makes it very easy to pick up even as a new learner. We started off by small objects such as a mobile phone or a wrench but slowly went on to apply our knowledge to bigger stuff in group projects. My favourite part of the module were the design sprints which are basically 4 week long short and time intensive group projects. What is amazing about these is that you learn so much in such a short time and actually get to create stuff which works (most of the time :D). The nature of the projects also makes it necessary to learn and use 3D printing which feels so cool as you can actually bring your ideas to life!

So that’s all for this blog, I don’t want to give you a very long read! Let me know in the comments if you want to know more about any of the above mentioned modules. Hope you enjoyed reading about all of my experiences as much as I enjoyed writing about them! Look out for the second part on the rest of the modules that you do in your first year of engineering! Until then, thanks for reading and feel free to ask me any questions in the comments below!