Student blog: Taking ownership of your engineering studies

Aisha, a second year student, shares some advice and tips on how to make the most out of your educational experience as an engineering student at TEDI-London.

TEDI-London is a unique place to study engineering – hands-on learning is one of its core attributes and many of you may have been drawn here because of it. We break away from the mould of traditional universities where you sit in lecture theatres and pour over textbooks; because of this, many study tips for university students (which often cater towards traditional universities) are not the most helpful to a TEDI-London student.

“I’ve picked up a lot of skills almost through the osmosis of simply working with other people.”

While I am only in my second year and still have a lot of improvement ahead of me in my academic career, here are some tips to getting the most out of your studies here.

📢 Communication is key and being a team player is necessary – TEDI is very group work heavy, so on top of developing engineering skills, you are also developing the soft skills of communication and teamwork which are necessary in all facets of life.

🙋‍♀️ Utilise your resources – Hands-on learning is all about applying theory and knowledge. You must first know the theory and knowledge in order to apply it. This is why we have the system of online nodes learning and then in-person class time.

To help with learning the theory, you don’t have to complete the learning nodes alone, you can organise small study groups and work through them together.

📕 You don’t only have to rely on the online learning materials, you’ll have access to KCL’s resources as well as IET, ICE, IMECHE AND IED’s – take advantage of your access to those wells of knowledge to develop your own.

💛 Utilise your network – not only can you look to our professors for more guidance and support but you can also learn from your peers.

I find that a lot of my development as a student has come from learning from my peers, observing them, asking them questions, asking them for tips. As many modules are completed as groups, I’ve found that I picked up a lot of skills almost through the osmosis of simply working with other people.

Curiosity, perseverance, and collaboration

I know I started the post going on about TEDI being unique in comparison to traditional universities but at the end of the day we are still an academic institution no matter how innovative we are – one thing we have in common with students at traditional universities is that we all have to take charge of our own learning and academic development. There is no one spoon feeding the course to you.

“Ok then Aisha, what does taking charge of my academic development look like?” 🧐

💡Staying on top of what you must achieve in each module. Every module has a student handbook and mark scheme available as well as a road map outlining what is going to be covered each week

💡 Assessing your strengths and weaknesses and seeking to develop them. A weakness of mine is coding, so to develop this skill I asked for advice from my peers – what they did and used to get good, and then set time aside each week to practice.

💡Perseverance and a lot of trial and error! Even with a lot of knowledge at your fingertips and help from your network, time and effort are required to develop a certain skill set. In these situations you have to embrace the process of trial and error and persevere.

💡Getting curious and staying curious. When presented with new information and skills, the most successful students are the ones that get curious and work to understand and develop that knowledge/skill set.

 

Learn more about what the student experience is like at TEDI-London.