ABOUT US
The Mechanical Engineering Society is a student-led society with nearly 1000 members (June 2017).
Our aim as a society is to help provide the best environment for our students to succeed. Our measures of success are focussed on our students’ welfare, their social and career opportunities. We work alongside the department to help organise events and ensure we are aligned with the academic program.
We are currently setting up and running several schemes to aid the growth of our students, including; a “Reach Out” program to help students connect with industry members and alumni, career development collaborations with companies to hold skills and CV sessions and numerous welfare and social schemes to ensure our students have balance amongst their studies and extra-curricular activities. We do our best to ensure we meet the needs of our students and are continually trying to grow the community within our student body.
Our Members
Our members are from many different backgrounds, countries and cultures.
They are some of the best engineering talent in the world. They regularly deal with highly time-pressured environments as part of their course and many still maintain various and impressive extra-curricular activities. This is part of the reason why our members are so valuable and sought-after.
64.5% of our society is made up of undergraduates (June 2017). This is around 650 students. Our society is 18.6% females while the UK average in engineering quoted is to be 15.8%. Our incoming cohort for 2017 for undergraduate studies is quoted to be 19% female.
We see that around one third of our students go into business and consultancy fields, one quarter go into finance and banking, around one third go into engineering or technical fields and the remaining enter public fields.
Our Strategy
We create detailed plans and schemes to ensure we achieve everything we set out to. The three areas we focus on to achieve this are the welfare, professional and social development of our members.
We feel creating this type of community has several secondary effects, most notably creating strong connections between students for improved career opportunities and social development.
Many of our students have different backgrounds and cultures that we tailor our programs to.
Furthermore, a great proportion of our students face a lot of struggles during their time at Imperial, beyond academia. We want to help them with these problems and prepare them for life after university.
Representing Imperial College London's Mechanical Engineering students
Welfare
We work hard to ensure our students are able to develop on a personal level. It’s extremely important that we are able to maintain the wellbeing of our students as their success is hugely reliant on their happiness during their studies.
Studying is a large part of their lives due to the rigorous course. Caring about student’s welfare is important in helping students have the opportunities to develop skills necessary in life after university. These include soft skills such as effective communication.
Mental health is a big issue within all departments at Imperial and we’re working hard to create innovative events to ensure we are the best at tackling this. There are many follow-on effects such as performance and personal development.
MUms & dads
This will be the first time that first year students meet their “parents”. Mums and Dads is a scheme for students in older years to support students in years below them. Typically two students (the parents) will have up to 4 “children”.
Torque
This event will give students the chance to present about something they are interested in to their peers. This gives a great opportunity for students to learn about subjects outside of engineering and gives a brief relief from work.
events
We plan to hold events 2-3 times a term which are free for students to turn up to. These will be casual events, from tea and biscuits to drone racing and yoga, where students from different years are able to meet over tea, coffee and snacks. We believe creating a great environment by changing the culture of the department will help students have a more enjoyable experience at university outside of academia.
Professional
We hold a wide range of career events to ensure we create a wide range of professional skills development opportunities. Our career events are there to ensure students can learn more about the partnering companies we work with (often those who want to recruit students) and meet representatives to ensure they make informed decisions when choosing to apply. We often achieve this through holding career event. Popular events include workshops and presentations. Our biggest career event is the speaker’s fair, to which we invite around 20 company representatives to inspire students with their story in a “speed-networking” type event.
Social
We believe that creating a community within our students has numerous benefits.
It also aids the way we work with sponsoring companies. Effective communication is key to ensuring our students hear clearly what our sponsors want.
We aim to create a community within different years and also across undergraduate and PhD students
Mechnet
We also work alongside Mechnet.
Mechnet is a student-led team that has developed a platform designed to help students learn the content of the course alongside traditional lectures and tutorials by the department.
The platforms used currently help store and edit documents which are used as a learning aid. Documents are supplementary to course notes, lecture slides and tutorials. The documents created are entirely by the students and continually improved through the collaboration of all the students.
The only goal of this platform is to create a greater community within our department. The idea of collaborating to help each other learn has been extremely effective and the year we ran it in has the most cohesion between students and academic achievements
