The best thing about being an engineering student is The Diamond because I just love the fact that it's all state of the art equipment

Watch: our interview with Olaide

I have been studying Electronic and Electrical engineering for two years at Sheffield and what I've really loved about it is the practical side of things. We get quite a few hours in a week to get practical with what we learn in the lectures so a lot of the time I go to lectures and sometimes don't understand what's going on but when I do come into the labs then I understand what I'm doing and how I can use this in industry. So it's not just theory, we also have the practical stuff.

After I graduate I want to go on into industry and work with renewable energy sources so, for example, solar energy, wind power, hydroelectric energy. I believe that this is the future because we will be finding renewable ways of actually generating energy without harming the environment. In my last two years I worked on a project for the Global Engineering Challenge researching renewable energy sources and suggesting which would be the best method that we could use in a village in Africa. This year I'm working on a project for a local company in Sheffield and they're asking us to find out how we can use solar panels or wind turbines to generate energy to supply power at off-peak times.

Last year we got into our tutor groups and we were given a task to put together a robot. After we built our robots we had to race it in the FYGER arena so this was a very fun experience for me because I got to compete with my other course mates and even though we didn't win it was still a great experience

The highlight of my studies so far has been learning about embedded systems in my second year and I have completed projects using Arduino and I've used the labview programming environment as well. At the moment I'm working with the freedom board which is another type of embedded system, so at the moment I’m programming onto it and I can get it to do a range of different functions based on the program I write.

After I graduate I want to go on into industry and work with renewable energy sources as I believe that this is the future because we will be finding renewable ways of actually generating energy without harming the environment. 

Olaide Otunaiya

Electronic and Electrical Engineering

The best thing about being an engineering student at Sheffield, I have quite a few things actually, so one would be The Diamond because all our labs for the first two years are here and I just love the fact that it's all state of the art equipment. I would also say the quality of teaching as I feel that my lecturers are great as they are ready to help you. There are a lot of tutorial questions for you to do and there is always help if you're not understanding anything.

We interviewed Olaide in 2017.