After looking at various engineering disciplines, I settled on mechanical engineering for its broad range of applications and its wide spread recognition in industry. I attended the Loughborough University open day and fell in love with the campus, the genuinely kind and helpful staff and the overall atmosphere, along with its great reputation in industry.
When I was considering which university to go to, I felt that Loughborough put a lot of emphasis on practical, application-based learning, and I was not wrong. There are many projects and practical sessions throughout the degree that require you to apply the theory you have learnt in lectures and develop a more intuitive understanding of engineering topics.
As well as developing a huge toolbox of core engineering fundamentals, Loughborough really helped me develop my project working skills. I was given many opportunities to work with students from other engineering disciplines and more impressively, with engineers working in a range of companies, through several industry-based projects. This gave me a good foundation going into industry.
One of my favourite memories from my time at Loughborough was during my first year. We were tasked to design and build a catapult, which was laser cut from an A3 sheet of MDF. Each team had to compete in a range of tasks with their catapult, culminating in a final contest. This was a lot of fun and despite the fact that we did more in-depth projects in later years, the catapult is my fondest memory as it introduced me to how fun engineering is.