I studied Aerospace Engineering at the University of Hertfordshire, included inmy course was a year out in industry. For this i worked at Airbus UK wing design centre at Bristol, great year and has really helped me get employment by talking about what i did there and using the industry jargon you simply cant get from an academic course. Also in the first week of the final year we went to cabin air for a flight in a light Cessna Aircraft and a RB-22 helicopter as part of the course to give the engineers an insight to real A/c dynamics (of course many of the course were part of the ATC in their teenage years) Awesome fun and i also managed a 2nd flight after pointing out the most faults with an a/c they had deliberatly made US for the students to do a maintaince check. Whilst at herfordshire i was also able to pursue my passion of motorsport through formula student, again a wonderful talking point in interviews and looks great on CV. Hard work but great fun and offers the broad spectrum of engineering issues, ie costing, bill of materials, design and most importantly hands on manufacture to give a real insight to tooling implications and methods.
After failing the NATS medical with a heart condition i swiftly found 2 jobs both in the Aerospace field. I accepted the offer from Atkins Aviation and Defence to start on their graduate scheme and started this week, my first project seems like its going to be A400M wingbox work And being a consultancy the variety of projects means you wont get too specialised and ill hopefully remain as broadly skilled as what my degree offered. Ive just been looking at the CV's online of the guys (and suprising number of girls) working here and plenty have degrees in Mech engineering, some 2:1 and some going on to PhD's etc. My main point to express to anyone is too get well learned in a wide range of engineering areas to start with, means you have plenty of doors to choice when you graduate.
Cheers
Jonny