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Old 5th February 2007 | 10:18
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Genghis the Engineer
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I think that it's telling that Flame's friend did a Foundations of Engineering course.

These are there for people who haven't got sufficient Maths and Physics grades at A-level, or who did the wrong A-levels (or lack some equivalent). Frankly, I don't think that many universities run them very well - huge class sizes, limited tutor support, a great deal of self reliance required.

To be honest, the best place to learn maths and physics is at school in an A-level class, or at a technical college on some form of post GCSE engineering related course - not in classes of 150 (I'm not kidding!) in a university whose real teaching talent really starts at the first year of undergraduate, not a year earlier in FoE.

That said, anybody who can survive FoE with good enough grades to enter a degree probably has a good future!

So, I'd take that post as more a (probably justifiable) condemnation of FoE courses in general, than of Kingston University, or or studying undergraduate Aero Eng. (Even Aero-Eng proper is fairly soul-destroying in the first year with huge amounts of maths, structures, basic fluid mechanics and so-on, but it gets a heck of a lot better after that.)

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