Undenominated Engineering

french365

I'm interested in doing engineering in college next year and i'm not sure which type i want to do yet, i know doing a common entry like in ucd is probably the best option but i live in west Waterford and going to cork suits me the best because it's close i know a lot of people and the cost of living is lower. But what i want to know is if the first year of common entry makes a big difference to what engineering you chose or would the decision be just as hard? At the moment im interested in electronic and electrical engineering but im not sure

confusticated

This year is the first year in UCC that engineering has been made much more common. Most subjects (all bar 2 afaik) are common to everyone, then you have one subject in your discipline (civil, elec, process or energy) and you pick one of the others as well. So for example if you're in elec you have to do the elec one, and you could pick either the civil, energy or process module. Going into second year you can choose to switch to the other one (whichever other module you picked). Afaik you can't choose to go into either of the other two, but I could be wrong on that or it could change next year, because it is the first year and there's bound to be a couple of changeovers. From what I've heard you also need to have the points for that course to change into it (open to correction on this, I'm not in the course, my brother is and he doesn't want to change so it's kind of irrelevant) just to stop people from getting into one course on low enough points just to change over to the other one as soon as they can.

Hope that helps, first year is pretty general and is getting more that way (I'm in final year and it's much more general now than it was when I was in first year, and I thought that'd be hard to get!) So the decision might be just as hard as now, but it will be better informed because you'd actually have some of the course done and be able to talk to older students/lecturers about how it progresses before you decide.

djpbarry

french365 wrote: »

...i live in west Waterford and going to cork suits me the best because it's close i know a lot of people and the cost of living is lower.

Cost of living aside, I wouldn't let any of those factors influence your decision - they're relatively minor issues in the grand scheme of things.

french365 wrote: »

But what i want to know is if the first year of common entry makes a big difference to what engineering you chose or would the decision be just as hard?

I did engineering in UCD and it helped me. When I was completing the CAO form I wasn't really sure what discipline I wanted to plump for, but 3 months into my first year in UCD and I knew I wanted to be an electronic engineer. And now I am.

kevinjhon

try to find out your interest; like if you have an interest in computers then computer engineering is good; if you have an interest in robots then robotics is good