Freshers Week – the calm before the storm

In the same week that ECS received excellent results in the latest Times/Sunday Times league tables, we also welcomed a record number of new students – over 250 first-year students (final figures yet to be announced) arrived for Freshers Week and are now coming to the end of JumpStart, our ECS induction programme.

ECS came third in the subject table for Electrical and Electronic Engineering (after Cambridge and Surrey), and sixth in the table for Computer Science. The University was 18th in the UK overall, rising two places from last year. Employment figures for Electrical and Electronic Engineering placed ECS third in the UK behind Cambridge and Aberdeen, and fourth for Computer Science behind Cambridge, Imperial College, and Bristol.

Among popular graduate destinations for ECS students this year were: J P Morgan, Micro Focus, FactSet, Bloomberg, ARM, Amazon, Imagination Technologies, Ericsson, BAE Systems, Chemring, New Voice Media, IBM, Selex ES, MWR, and a range of consultancies in Cambridge. We continue to work hard to build relationships with companies keen to employ our students, and expect to have around 80 companies attending our annual Careers Fair on 10 February 2015.

These are all strong indicators which should stand us in good stead in the next round of University applications. Other features of student life which help create the unique culture in ECS (in addition to the quality of our teaching, labs, and technical facilities) are the wide range of extra-curricular opportunities.

Bunfight 2015

This year 13 different ECS societies were represented at the ‘Bunfight’ (above), covering a range of interests from outreach and wireless communications to enterprise and cyber security. The largest societies, ECSS and IEEE. also hold challenge events taking place over weekends, with the IEEE-Xtreme coding event coming up on 18 October. ECS did outstandingly well in this 24-hour marathon last year. Many alumni return to give talks about their career activities, and talks on algorithmic trading, patent attorneyship and digital marketing are already lined up for this year. A new event is our ‘HackaSoton-HackaGlobal’ event, in November, which will see student representatives coming from as far away as Moscow and Teheran to take part in a weekend event in Zepler Building.

There’s no shortage of things for the new Freshers to do! And with job applications for summer 2015 already open, it might be hard to fit it all in once lectures start on Monday!