Overview

The Engineering, Economics and Management course is taught jointly by:

• The Department of Engineering Science
• The Department of Economics
• The Saïd Business School

The objective of the course is to produce graduates who combine a sound knowledge of engineering with an understanding of the principles of manangement and economics.

The background of students taking this course is likely to be similar to that of those taking Engineering Science.

The First Year

The First Year of the EEM course is common with the Engineering Science course.

The Second and Third Years

Engineering content

In the second and third years of the EEM course you study core subjects which provide the essential foundations of general engineering

• Mathematics
• Engineering Computation

and two subjects from

• Electronic and Information Engineering
• Structures, Materials and Dynamics
• Energy Systems

You will also take engineering options at an intermediate level. Options will be offered in the areas of:

• Mechanical Engineering
• Civil Engineering
• Electronic Engineering
• Information Engineering
• Chemical Engineering
• Biomedical Engineering

Practical work supplements each of these subjects and includes intensive courses on various practical topics carried out during the summer term of the second year. There may be the opportunity to take an approved language course in place of some coursework.

You will also take courses that relate technical issues to engineering practice in society, for example the professional oblications of engineers and engineering project management.

The Engineering Science Third Year Design Project aims to give you experience of, and insight into, the engineering design process. You work in a small design team of 4 to 5 students to produce a report in the form of a detailed design proposal which could then be used either by a manufacturer as the basis for a marketable product, or as a design for a proposed engineering project. The teams usually comprise students from both the Engineering Science and EEM courses. You have to make the main design and economic decisions, selecting from among several, possibly conflicting design possibilities, allocate work packages amongst your group, and organise your own project meetings outside of the weekly classes that are held with the academic project leaders. Visiting Professors of Engineering Design participate and provide guidance and technical advice drawn from their industrial experience. The following are examples of third year design projects:

• Optical fabrication system for nanotechnology: Light is a versatile tool for engineering on microscopic scales. Perhaps the most well-known such application of light is in optical microscopes that enable us to observe specimens with high resolution. However, light has other less conventional uses that can be applied to nano-fabrication. This project involved the design of an optical nano-fabrication facility that could be used for a variety of applications.
• Ambulance of the Future: This project was multidisciplinary. Project teams were expected to put together a specification for the ‘ambulance of the future’ and to design various aspects of it. There was plenty of scope for design in areas such as the vehicle itself, its payload (e.g. medical instrumentation, patient transport), communications.
• Large scale projects to minimize the effect of humanity on the globe, Sahara solar energy system: this project involved designing a system to produce sustainable energy using desert land in the Sahara and formulate an energy distribution scheme to market across the world.

Economics and Management

You will begin the study of Economics and Management through lecture courses on:

• Introduction to Management (in the second Year)
• Introductory Economics (in the third year)

The Final Year

In the final year of the course, each student undertakes either a 24-week placement attached to an industrial firm, or a 24-week internal university project. The project must be of value to the firm in which the student is placed, or must contribute to a research programme within the university. For industrial projects, students are supervised by an academic tutor and an industrial supervisor. A report must be written describing the project.

In the fourth year you will take specialist options in Engineering, together with two papers chosen from a list of Economics and Management papers.

Course Structure and Content

The Summary table shows how the Engineering, Economics and Management course evolves over the four years.

The programme specification (PDF, 140KB) gives further information about the course.

And afterwards?

All Oxford engineering graduates are in high demand from the spectrum of engineering industries, but EEM graduates are especially attractive to engineering consultancy firms.

More Information about Economics and Management

Visit the

• The Department of Economics
• The Saïd Business School