The brave new world of science and engineering at Southampton University

Last week students from EF Academy Torbay visited Southampton University. The trip focused on Maths, Engineering and Computer Sciences so we took first year students with an interest in studying in those areas. After we made the long journey from Devon to Southampton we were greeted by members of the universities admissions teams for a tour around the main university campus.

The University of is a public research university located in Southampton, England. Southampton is a founding member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities in Britain. In the most recent Research Excellence Framework the university was ranked the 18th best research institution in the United Kingdom for average quality of research submitted.

The origins of the university date back to the founding of the Hartley Institution in 1862 following a legacy to the Corporation of Southampton by Henry Robinson Hartley. In 1902, the Institution developed into the Hartley University College awarding degrees from the University of London. On 29 April 1952, the institution was granted a Royal Charter to give the University of Southampton full university status, allowing it to award its own degrees. The University of Southampton currently has 17,485 undergraduate and 7,390 postgraduate students, making it the largest university by higher education students in the South East region.

The university has seven teaching campuses. The main campus is located in the Highfield area of Southampton and is supplemented by four other campuses within the city.

Following a tour of the main areas of the campus we went into meet members of the Maths department for a talk on the programs that the university offers and the kind of academic research that they are currently working on. We then made our way to the Computer Science department for an amazing, funny and slightly unusual talk by one of the universities leading computer scientists who is somewhat of rising star in the tech world working with company like Google and Facebook .

This was followed by a tour around the engineering department where we met students studying on their phd’s doing research into drones and their application in the commercial sector. We then visited their marine engineering department and had the amazing opportunity of seeing their fluid dynamics lab which is basically a huge and very long pool of deep water that is used to test the effectiveness of ships at speed in water.

This was an amazing visit and had the real wow factor for our students because they got the chance to meet both students and university staff and actually had the chance to hear about the work that they do. It was very inspiring because many of them spoke about the amazing careers that can open up from a degree course at a uni like this but they also saw what amazing and groundbreaking technology and equipment they would have the chance to work with.