I'm very happy to turn over this blog posting to Glenn Miles, lecturer at Coventry University who tells us more about the new Manufacturing Engineering Degree.
It is late September as I write and next month sees the return of students to Coventry University. This year, as new course director of the relatively new Manufacturing Engineering degree, I have inherited a unique set of final year students.
They are unique in several respects. Most appropriately for this blog they will be the first graduates of the new course and will be the living evidence of the hard work that has gone into the creation and delivery of the course as it prepares for accreditation with the IET.
They will also be the first graduates that have been taught on the UK’s first “Faculty on the Shop Floor”, a Unipart-Coventry University collaboration that is embodied within the Institute for Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering (AME). Unlike the graduates of our other engineering degrees, our Manufacturing Engineering graduates have spent three years working side-by-side with Unipart employees on real products, exercising the skills they are learning in real time. Every week from the first year to the final year the course blends project work and taught material, and every week those students will find themselves walking through the doors that take them from the AME’s high-tech teaching and research facilities onto the bustling production lines of Unipart’s North Coventry manufacturing facility.
In essence, these students have spent three years studying for a degree but also spent three years getting experience of how it is to work in a real factory, how teams work in the manufacturing sector and importantly, how to communicate with everyone from those on the product line all the way up to the directors. Whether they stay with us on our four-year MEng programme or opt to finish with a BEng after three, they will be perfectly comfortable in a manufacturing environment from the first day on the job. And that is the big win for both the students and their prospective employers.
The signs are very good going in to this final year. Three of our Manufacturing students spent a semester at Purdue University, working at Subaru’s state-of-the-art plant in Indiana and are returning to complete their third year at the AME. The feedback on our students from the US has been exemplary and will help us to grow that international relationship as well as others.
Thanks for that insight Glenn, and look out for further posts from Glenn and others in the coming months.
If you have anything manufacturing related that you would like to blog about, don't hesitate to email me direct.
