The aim of the Cambridge Engineering course is to provide you with all the analytical, design and computing skills that underpin modern Engineering practice, while encouraging the creativity and problem-solving skills that are so important to a good engineer.

Engineering is, by its nature, a broad discipline, and professional engineers are routinely expected to apply their understanding, experience, and knowledge to a vast range of problems. The Cambridge Engineering course emphasises this generality by making the first two years common to all students, regardless of the specialism you might intend to pursue in years three, four, and beyond.

This demands great flexibility of you, since we would need you to be an independent thinker with the agility to turn your mind quickly to unfamiliar problems. The common language that binds the different facets of Engineering together is mathematics, so a high level of mathematical aptitude is a prerequisite.

Practical skills and creativity form a large part of Engineering; making models and prototypes, and designing and performing experiments are daily work for many professional engineers. An innate curiosity for how things work is also admirable.

Full course details are provided on the Department’s Prospective Undergraduates and Applicant Information webpages, as well as the University’s Undergraduate Study webpage.

Engineering at Churchill

Churchill College is the ideal place to study Engineering. The College was founded to pursue excellence in teaching and research with a special emphasis on science and technology. It is the role of engineers to put science and technology to use in solving the technical problems facing the world, and to exploit the opportunities technology presents in an environmentally, socially and politically responsible manner. In this way, engineers provide a crucial interface between the sciences and society.

Engineers are therefore at the heart of Sir Winston Churchill’s vision of Churchill College in the twenty-first century and beyond. Engineers of the twentieth century have been concerned with the design of machines, structures and electronics, but this is only the start. In the future, engineers will also be at the forefront of developments to tackle challenges such as climate change, and ensuring the safe, effective and efficient use of scarce resources such as oil and fresh water on a global scale.

In Churchill, we are uniquely positioned to engage with the challenges ahead, both quite literally in our geographical location and also by building on our short but rich heritage. Churchill’s location to the west of the city centre used to be on the fringes of Cambridge University. However, over recent decades significant portions of the University have moved to West Cambridge, including approximately half the Engineering Department. West Cambridge currently houses centres for geotechnical engineering, turbomachinery, electronics and photonics, and communications, which are all within a few minutes’ walk of the College.

Churchill has a dedicated suite of rooms for Engineering teaching, and boasts one of the highest numbers of Engineering Fellows of any of the Cambridge Colleges. The majority of these Fellows are active in teaching and research either in the College or in the Engineering Department.