The University's strong industry links make Sheffield a great place to study

I was always fascinated by aircraft and I wanted to know how they were designed and how they flew. Why Sheffield? It’s one of the top universities in the country for aerospace engineering. I was even more interested after attending a UCAS open day where I learned more about the course and saw the facilities for myself.

One of my favourite parts of the course was the Private Pilot Instruction module where I had the opportunity to learn to fly. I also enjoyed going on the Jetstream 31, a flying laboratory, at Cranfield University in third year.

They really helped me understand the theory of aircraft characteristics as they were applied to actual flights. Another favourite was the group design project, where I worked in a team with other students to design and build an Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV), which was a lot of fun – especially when we saw the UAV which we’d spent months working on fly.

The course has definitely been good preparation for my career. The Industrial Training Programme with Rolls-Royce in my final year was particularly useful, as I was able to see how engineering problems are tackled in industry.

The links between the University and industry is the one the reasons why Sheffield is a great place to study aerospace engineering.

Salma Dwikartika

Graduate Mechanical Engineer, Safran Landing Systems

The guest lecturers from different engineering companies who came for the Advanced Manufacturing module were also very good, enabling us to see how the manufacturing techniques we’d learnt about in lectures were being used in industry.

They also gave me the opportunity to network with a broad range of engineering companies, which I may not have known about otherwise. The links between the University and industry is the one the reasons why Sheffield is a great place to study.

Since leaving university, I’ve been working at Safran Landing Systems in Gloucester, on their graduate scheme as a Graduate Mechanical Engineer. The company manufactures landing gear for commercial and military aircrafts.

So far I’ve worked in Systems Engineering, Design & Analysis and Test Engineering. I’ve been able to see the design of landing gear from 2D and 3D drawings, and then see it being machined, assembled and tested, so it's all very exciting for me. I had to use Matlab for one of my projects, so the module at university which involved Matlab definitely came in useful.

I’ve also been involved with Flying Start Challenge, where I teach high school pupils about the basics of flight and help them build gliders to be entered into an engineering competition.

In terms of my future career plans, I am working to get an engineering chartership with IMechE and I hope to become a technical expert in the future.