This is the only dedicated Systems Engineering Undergraduate course in the country. Combining theory and practice throughout, it does not lock you in to a stove pipe discipline but allows you to tailor your degree to suit your interests or chosen career paths. Companies actively seek our undergraduate system engineers because we produce the best undergraduate system engineers in the world. This is the range of skills we facilitate in addition to teaching engineering theory and practice an analytical approach to enable students to model, understand, quantify and characterise problems ability to understand customer needs and translate them into a set of functional requirements which will deliver a system 'fit for purpose' creativity to explore innovative 'out of the box' approaches and alternative solutions to take an holistic view of the problem space and not leap into solutions which will probably not deliver against customer requirements an awareness of the many disciplines that impact on system design, from the different branches of engineering to law, commerce, management, logistics and politics strong communication and team building skills through group project work in each year leadership and people skills so that they can take group members with them when they are right but also the ability to listen to their colleagues and learn when they are wrong. Those qualities can all be taught but successful system engineers need something more – insight that lets them see the real problem and its solution and not be deflected by the surface detail. Systems Engineering is the structured comprehensive approach to solving today’s complex technical challenges, particularly those related to the design and development of highly sophisticated systems, such as aircraft, ships, automobiles, telecommunications networks, energy infrastructures or information management systems. The complex integrated systems that influence so many domains in our society today (transport, health, finance, security, military, education, energy etc) can only be satisfactorily designed by considering the system as a whole. That includes looking across all of the component parts of a system and along the whole system lifecycle from feasibility through design, manufacture and operations to disposal. It is the systems engineer's job to integrate all the key elements in a system including hardware, software, firmware, people, information, techniques, facilities and services, to achieve the required system capability and performance. The breadth of Systems Engineering means that it impacts upon the system development process, the management of projects, the way in which project teams work effectively, the introduction of innovative products and the development of well-integrated products, systems or services.

The recognised importance of Systems Engineering in the modern world and the broad-based nature of our Systems Engineering course means that graduates enjoy employment opportunities in a wide range of commercial domains. Recent graduate destinations include Royal Navy, GE Aviation, Siemens, BAE Systems, TRW Automotive, Jaguar Land Rover, Shell and Airbus. The Government’s first destination statistics for the last three years indicate that almost 90% of our graduates, on average, are in professional employment six months after graduating.