Oh God, I’m Third Year Now!

It’s back! To my regular readers (hi, mum!) I can only apologise for the absence, but with the new term being three weeks in, I thought it only fair to crank out another post. In my defence, the last few weeks have been a series of realisations that I’ve got yet another thing to procrastinate over!

One good thing about third year is that, from now on it’s civil all the way. Those starting an engineering course at Warwick at the moment will be specialised by term 2 of second year, but I had two full years of everything. Last year I suffered through lectures on transistors, thermodynamics and financial accounting – no longer! This does mean that some of the stuff I’m doing now, like looking at geological maps, are a lot later than you might do them in a uni offering straight CivEng. That’s actually quite nice, as it’s a little less intense than having endless third-year textbooks thrown (metaphorically!!) into you face on top of a dissertation.

Oh, yes, the d-word. For my cohort at least, there is only a single difference in the course structure between a BEng and an MEng degree for the first three years – MEng students do an individual dissertation, whilst BEng students do a group project. If you’re thinking of a four-year course and smiling smugly at the thought of skipping group projects, don’t fret: you get to do a multidisciplinary one in your final year! Fun times.

In two weeks’ time, I’m due to submit a 10-side feasibility assessment for my own dissertation – laying out what I’ll be doing, how it’ll meet the learning objectives, an ethics statement and other riveting info. At this point, I have about a side of bullet points, so it looks like I’ll be cracking down over the next few days! The dissertation is probably the first and only truly massive piece of individual work I’ll be doing in the degree programme – 25% of my grade this year. The only thing keeping me sane is the knowledge that everybody else somehow makes it through. Also, I can spin this into ‘evidence of time management’ and other soundbites when it comes to reapplying for internships at all the companies who never got back to me last year.

Until next time!

Nathan L