What is the best university to study engineering?

There are lots of different factors that you should consider when applying for Engineering. For the type of Engineering you want to choose, you might want to specialise straight away or you might want to try different branches of Engineering before you specialise. In the first case, if you already know which branch of Engineering you would like to do, some universities will be better at Mechanical Engineering (e.g. Imperial College) while some universities will be better at Information Engineering and so on. However, if you would like to try General Engineering before specialising, only a few universities offer this, including: Cambridge, Oxford, King's College London, etc. Another aspect you may want to look into is the facilities that the university has. If you would like to have very 'hands-on' engineering involving making things yourself using tools that the university has available (e.g. 3D printers, laser cutters), you may want to look into which of these facilities will be available to students at the different universities.

There are so many different types of engineering, so it's important to know which type appeals to you the most as a first step! Depending on which type of engineering you decide on, there are a few options, however, names such as Cambridge, Imperial and UCL are very reputable across the board. The Times League table can also be a helpful guide to support your view of who is doing well. If you are interested in gaining work experience in between your second and third year, some courses offer the option to work, and are called sandwich degrees. This can be a great way to earn money as a student! Schools such as Loughborough University, Imperial and Manchester have great relationships with different companies, who hire students every year. The sandwich option is definitely a great way to differentiate you as candidate once you graduate, so it might help to factor this into your search. Good luck!

There are many variations of engineering: general, mechanical, aerospace, electrical and civil to name a few. Each one of these degree programmes will be incredibly different. For example, civil engineering will focus more on structures and materials than a electrical engineering degree might. Therefore, to determine the best university to study engineering you should start by identifying the area of engineering that you would like to study. Next, you should check the university rankings for that specific subject (to do this, google search “official top 100 university engineering”). At this point, you might think that the university at the top is the best - not necessarily, this just means that that university has the best score after some quantitative (rather than qualitative) data has been collected. Choose a list of different universities from that list and consider the differences between them - is one university a city/campus university, what modules does this course include, what is a typical class size etc.? The best university is not necessarily the one with the highest score, because the best university for you is highly subjective. For example, I’ve been to a Russell Group city university, and a non-Russell Group campus university. My experiences of each were vastly different, but at the time they were the ‘best’ universities for me. As a result I did much better than I would have in an arguably better university.