Choosing the EngD

Like the majority of you reading these lines now, the term "EngD" meant nothing to me until relatively recently. Students can study for a Doctorate of Engineering (to give it its full title) at one of the 15 academic centres in the UK.

Each centre has its own 'specialist' area around which it offers projects. The Surrey/Brunel programme that I'm registered with specialises in the field of 'environmental technology' though this could perhaps be better described as projects that deal with topics related to sustainable development – reducing the impact of human activity on the planet. Other centres deal with such things as photonics, steel technology and power technology. A full list of centres and their specialties can be found here (pdf file).

Project creation tends to happen in one of the three following ways:

— an organisation comes up with an idea for a project, approaches the EngD centre who help to recruit a candidate and assign an academic supervisor
— an academic member of staff has an idea for a project and seeks an industrial partner before recruiting a student
— a potential student has an idea for a project and approaches the university who help find a suitable company

Having been unsure what to do post graduation, I was fairly sure that I didn’t want to do a PhD especially since I was certainly not keen to stay with physics (my undergraduate degree). For me, the EngD allowed the chance to:
— change disciplines (I am now classed as a Civil/Environmental engineer)
— stay in academia whilst also working in the ‘real world’
— gain a qualification that is (apparently) much in demand
— call myself "doctor" at the end of the scheme

Tomorrow I’ll try and provide so more information of the structure of the EngD and more details on my project.