Typical Week in the Life of a Mechanical Engineering Student

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As a Mechanical Engineering student, first year and second year timetables are quite similar. The contact time of this course is around 20-30 hours per week as it varies due to different laboratory arrangements for every student. Apart from laboratories, tutorial sessions, lectures for all seven modules and compulsory drop-in sessions make up the structure of a Mechanical Engineering course.

For the majority of the week, I wake up at around 8 am to prepare and get ready for my 9 am lectures or tutorials. As I live with my course mates, we tend to walk to the university together every morning. Waking up early may be annoying at times, but it is definitely rewarding as you get to learn useful information as well as motivate yourself to start working early in the day. Most of these sessions are interactive as lecturers like to remind students of learning materials, you are also encouraged to ask questions directly to the lecturer or PGTA by the end of the lecture – make use of this opportunity as they always solve them while providing detailed explanations!

Since the lectures usually take place consecutively, there won’t be times where you feel like time is wasted by being at the university for a couple of hours just to wait for the next lecture. A lot of students prefer this arrangement because it means that there’s more time to work at home. For each semester, we are required to submit a lab report based on the laboratories that we did. Therefore, it is always helpful to ask questions during the experiments to get in-depth understanding and to know the causes of errors occurred for future references or improvements.

On the weekends, I usually get together with my friends to chill after a long week of studying. Movie night is one of the best things to do as you can socialise and eat while watching your favourite films. If this isn’t your type of thing, pizza nights or casual pub nights are also highly recommended! However, there are times where everyone just wants to stay at home for a calm weekend – all in all, work hard and play hard. Balancing both university and social life is always the important key to maintain a healthy mind-set and making the most of your time at university.

My housemates and I, engineering our friendship…(no pun intended)