My friends and occasional detractors will know that I've a bit of a bee in my bonnet about aerospace engineering degrees in the United Kingdom.
Specifically, it's my opinion that there are enough...
- Junior design / analysis professionals in the industry who want extra academic qualifications to advance their careers, and
- Experienced technicians / LAME who would like the academics to move out of the rain and into the design office, and
- Talented amateurs or potential startup companies who would like to design their own aeroplanes / engines / avionics, and
- People, either inside or outside the industry, who would like to make a career change into aerospace engineering...
To justify there being available at least one distance learning (OU style) BEng degree in Aerospace Engineering. My vested interest is mainly that I deal with a lot of people in the light aviation industry who would benefit enormously from this (and if they had this sort of education, it would make my own job far easier).
It's niggled me for a long time that there isn't and I've spent quite a lot of time knocking on the doors of various Engineering professors to try and persuade them to make one available.
Well, I seem to have finally persuaded a university to take a serious look at putting this together. I can't say who at the moment (it's up to them to make such public announcements, not me), but it is a top-league Engineering university "somewhere in England" who already run several well regarded full-time undergraduate courses in the same subject.
They've asked me if I would try and do a little digging for them - specifically they need some idea of a minimum number of people in the UK who might be interested, and roughly what their academic background is.
So, would anybody be prepared - either here or privately to me, to give any indication? The sole reason I'm asking for this is to help the Prof. who would be driving it persuade his university to release the funding to start advertising and putting it together. I believe that this could be of huge benefit to the industry as a whole, as well as to many people's careers (not mine, I've got one already!) - which is the reason I've expended so much time and energy on it.
Given what I'm trying to do, by all means anybody cross-post this to other places; my Email address is
[email protected]
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