Student Blog: Engineering at Brasenose College

The last four years of my life have been INTENSE! I have just finished my undergraduate master’s in engineering science at Brasenose College and now I am writing this student blog to reflect on my time here. I don’t think 17-year-old me could have ever imagined what she was signing up for when she applied to go here, much less that it would be the best decision she ever made. From engaging with leading experts in their fields, to dancing at balls and taking part in crazy traditions, Oxford has offered me so many new and exciting experiences. I can’t possibly summarise my whole four years in a few paragraphs, so instead I will focus on just a few of the key aspects that have defined my time here.

Friends:

I know it’s a cliché, but the absolute best part of my time at Oxford was spending time with friends. There is a reason that Brasenose is known as “the friendliest college”! I remember how scared I was before starting university, not just about moving away from home, but also about the prospect of having to make new friends. However, everyone finds their people. For me, it was the ones who I could have conversations (and sometimes arguments) with about the most ridiculous topics, like “Was Shakespeare good at spelling?”.

Balancing the heavy work schedule with socialising and hobbies was tough, but it was made infinitely easier by having friends who were doing exactly the same thing. A few hours in the library goes very quickly when you know you are going to the JCR (Junior Common Room) to play pool afterwards!

Fourth Year Project:

A key part of my final year was my Fourth Year Project: “What the Fork? A Robotic System for Personalised Kitchen Drawer Organisation.”  Apart from proving that engineers have a great sense of humour with my quirky title, I developed a robotic system capable of sorting objects into drawers based on their categories. The robot would move around the kitchen and observe a set of kitchen drawers. It would then observe a set of objects to be sorted and determine both in which and where within each drawer to place them. A key challenge I focused on was personalisation – how can a robot adapt its sorting strategy to suit different users and environments? I ended up using a Large Language Model (similar to ChatGPT) to decide which objects belonged in which drawer.

I loved this project because it was challenging. It was my first experience with independent, extended research at university, and it required a much more advanced understanding of programming than anything I’d done before. This meant that I learnt a lot, not just about computer vision and machine learning, but about organising and scheduling a project and writing a research paper. I was also part of a group within the Oxford Robotics Institute and really enjoyed learning about all of the fascinating work that other students and researchers were doing.

Brunch:

I’m not saying that anyone should choose a college or even a university based on hash browns… but if they were going to, Brasenose is the place to be. College brunch runs every Saturday and Sunday for every week of every term. Let’s assume that I attended 80% of these brunches over my 4 years and consumed two hash browns at each one. This means that I ate approximately 307 hash browns during my time at Brasenose. This metric acts as my qualification to be able to say that Brasenose has the best hash browns in the whole of the UK, nay the whole world, and so if you like breakfast foods, then Brasenose is the place for you.

Natalia – formerly of Gordano School