Undergraduate Study at UCL Engineering

We are known for taking bright, thoughtful, creative people and giving them the knowledge, skills, and experience they need to engineer a better world. We teach them to think, make, model, design, analyse, challenge, and innovate, and then let them practice what they’ve learned by tackling engaging projects that address real-world problems.

Most importantly, we give our students the chance to develop as individuals and follow their own intellectual interests, while providing the structure they need to develop a coherent body of expertise.

Why study at UCL Engineering?

Cutting-edge learning methods

You will learn in a variety of ways. Some will be lecture-based, while some will provide you with the materials and support to self-study through video and written material, problem sheets, exercise classes and tutorials. For example, we use flipped lectures to make the most of UCL’s already excellent staff student ratio, preserving class time for interaction by doing the ‘lecturing’ through recordings beforehand. You will also spend time in experimental or computer labs learning key technical skills.

Real projects

We know, as do employers, that it takes more than just technical knowledge to make a productive engineer. Interdisciplinary team working, project management, communication, critical thinking and design skills are all vital. So is the ability to balance market opportunity with considerations of ethics, sustainability, and the law.

None of these skills can be taught properly by just having students sit passively in a lecture or ponder a thought experiment. They need to discuss and reflect, make decisions, and do real work in an engineering context. Our students get this opportunity: in the first two years alone, students in our integrated programmes participate in at least eight intensive team-based projects that are relevant to their courses. That’s above and beyond what they do in labs.

Our teaching philosophy

The majority of our undergraduate programmes benefit from being part of our award-winning integrated engineering framework - a methodology in which we combine innovative teaching methods and an industry-oriented curriculum with discipline-specific, accredited degree programmes. Students are given the opportunity to participate in interdisciplinary activities and develop their transferable professional skills in the context of real-world engineering projects.

All programmes listed with an asterisk below follow at least some aspects of this teaching methodology.