Energy Engineering

carlos123455

I am considering doing the energy course in UCC. i put it down as my first choice on the CAO. Could anyone give me some opinions on the course? General descriptions of the subjects, the hours involved etc.
Also how hard is it to get into the extra year for a masters degree??
Thanks for any help.

magicianz

I'm in electrical myself but you will have a common 1st year with all the other engineering courses in UCC. The first year isn't too bad, if you're coming in with decent maths and physics and applied maths you can breeze through first year, otherwise the workload will be heavier but not really that heavy, how many hours it takes you really depends on the person. After first year it ramps up hard. Double first year work load, then third year it gets heavier again and then 4th year im not sure of, but i imagine its going to be the same difficulty or heavier again.

The points for all the engineering courses are deceptive, people who score either right on the points or maybe +30 to + 50 from the points can struggle, some drop out. We went from about 136 across all engineering courses to under 100 between 1st and 2nd year.

Don't leave those numbers fool you, they are great courses, but you need to be able to make yourself sit down and learn, you can NOT breeze past in engineering past 1st year.

carlos123455

Thanks for the reply. I'm doing physics and applied maths for the leaving cert so first year should be oky from what you have said. Just out of curiuosity, how many hours of lectures do those engineering courses have?

podgemonster

carlos123455 wrote: »

Thanks for the reply. I'm doing physics and applied maths for the leaving cert so first year should be oky from what you have said. Just out of curiuosity, how many hours of lectures do those engineering courses have?

1st year in Electrical isnt too bad from what i remember. Maybe 15 hours of lectures a week with 6-8 hours of labs. Alot of short 5 credit modules with 90 minute final exam and usually with 40% continous assesment that you can get 30/40 easily if you put the effort in.

The following years get alot tougher, I pretty much was doing 9am-6pm everyday, morning lectures and evening labs. In final year for the final year projects security were pretty much throwing us out of the Elec Eng building at 10.30pm.

carlos123455

Thanks a lot for the info.

Last question, how many students are in the engineering courses each year??

confusticated

Afaik there's about 30 places in process, maybe the same in energy, 40-50 in elec and 70 odd in civil but civil hasn't been filled the last couple of years and they're making first year more common to all eng courses so it could be changing.

magicianz

Sorry, all messages from boards.ie are filtered so just saw this now.

First year energy/elec are about 18-24 hours per term, you can see some timetables by looking for the course on timetable.ucc.ie and going to the energy engineering course 1. That has most of the stuff on it, there may be some extra labs/tutorials though.

While there is a bit of continuous assesment, it ranges from full for one of the 5 credit modules and 10% for some other modules, the final exams are still the highest %, though semesterization is coming in for Electrical in 2 years, not sure about the others. In first year for me there was just under 140 people in all the streams. Electrical and energy are probably the 2 most popular.

carlos123455

Thanks a lot.

runitfaster

What ever you do don't do energy in Cork. If you want to do energy engineering do it in NUIG. It's a better recognized course. As a third year I will give you my experience of the course.

I'll tell you why I believe it.
Energy engineering in cork was a course set up to deal with the dropping numbers in electrical engineering, very little research went into it. We're thrown into random modules with civil engineering and electrical and have no modules solely for ourselves.
When we graduate we wont be energy engineers specializing in any particular stream. For example in Galway you can graduate as an energy engineering in electrical engineering but in cork you come out with basically a broad engineering degree.

If you're thinking energy engineering you should think about electrical engineering as it is very similar and you'll have a better degree at the end of it. Also the "choices" of electives in 4th year the prospectus talks about? We're not given any choice

If you want more advise talk to the head of our department, hang on a second we don't have one! We also don't have a building for ourselves and are forced to take over the electrical engineering building or the civil building. We don't get to know the people in the year above us because we have no society or "base" where we can go on computers, do reports etc like the other 3 courses in ucc

Message me for more information if you like!

carlos123455

Thanks ill definitely take this into consideration.

Aren't ye supposed to focus purely on energy in the fourth year though?
I heard that first 3 years are a lot of general engineering but fourth was supposed to be just energy?

quietsailor

runitfaster wrote: »

What ever you do don't do energy in Cork. If you want to do energy engineering do it in NUIG. It's a better recognized course. As a third year I will give you my experience of the course.

I'll tell you why I believe it.
Energy engineering in cork was a course set up to deal with the dropping numbers in electrical engineering, very little research went into it. We're thrown into random modules with civil engineering and electrical and have no modules solely for ourselves.
When we graduate we wont be energy engineers specializing in any particular stream. For example in Galway you can graduate as an energy engineering in electrical engineering but in cork you come out with basically a broad engineering degree.
The flip side of that is you have a broad base of engineering knowledge so you've an easier task if you decide to move between disciplines later on.

If you're thinking energy engineering you should think about electrical engineering as it is very similar and you'll have a better degree at the end of it. Also the "choices" of electives in 4th year the prospectus talks about? We're not given any choice.
Again it depends if you want to specialise towards Elec Eng, many may not

If you want more advise talk to the head of our department, hang on a second we don't have one! We also don't have a building for ourselves and are forced to take over the electrical engineering building or the civil building. We don't get to know the people in the year above us because we have no society or "base" where we can go on computers, do reports etc like the other 3 courses in ucc.
You should get to know the people above you in energy as you all use the same computers in either the elec or civil building. We rarely used the process computers as there was only one process module that we needed specific software for - design of a heat exchanger

Regarding the lack of a specific building and "chain of command" :eek: runitfaster is correct, that is one woefully bad thing about the course.

The few years I was there I found the classes very friendly, then again I will talk to any and every one, sometimes even when they want me to feck off out of it, you may not be the same personality.

Be aware though that any engineering in UCC is hard work, expect 9-5 mon to fri and if labs are overfull you may have labs as late as 6 as well. On top of this there is a lot of reports and projects so you will spend considerable extra time in the library & sitting in front of a computer. It's not just a case of going to class and then not working until the April study month - that's a 99%* recipe for failing.

If your looking this long term ahead and your thinking how to achieve the best job also think about your summer work - can you get a job in an engineering company, maybe at weekends - that will impress prospective employers as much as any degree

There are energy/elec/process/civil engineers who work in the computer gaming and financial industries, none of which you'd think have a reason to hire engineers. They look for logic skills and hard work - any engineering course will give you this so again specific engineering courses aren't as important as the ability to think and work hard. Again UCC's energy may be a good selection for you if your not 100% sure you'll end up working in the energy industry - I originally trained as a Marine Engineer and am now working in the pharma, Process Eng would have been a better original course for me but it worked well for me in the end


* = Yes I know there is always the one genius who memorises books at first glance and passes without studying - hence 99% and not 100%