Harsh – Electronics & Control
I'm Harsh, and from my very first year, much of my time was spent in the Electronics and Control lab, where I was introduced to practical engineering work.
Beyond regular lab sessions, the E&C lab staff run "Diamond Wednesday" every week – sessions designed to help students develop circuit building skills and work on their own electronics projects with expert support. Before these sessions, I found electronics quite theoretical and struggled to connect concepts to real applications.
Diamond Wednesday became the foundation of my practical skills. I built expertise in electronic components, sensors, hand tools, soldering, Arduino programming, and circuit design. These sessions were particularly enjoyable because they allowed me to see theory come to life through hands-on work. Around Christmas, I made an electronic Christmas tree by soldering components and LEDs onto a prototype board – it was brilliant seeing something I'd built actually light up! One of my most memorable experiences was our first-year project where my group programmed a robot to navigate a track autonomously, really testing both my coding skills and problem-solving ability under pressure.
Building on that foundation, second and third year brought increasingly ambitious challenges. I built an autonomous robot from scratch with my team – handling 3D fabrication, electronics assembly, and programming it to follow a track and draw a cross on a whiteboard entirely by itself. The E&C lab was central for circuit design and programming, and those long days at the Diamond really honed my interpersonal and technical skills. By third year, I tackled my MEng project with Siemens, working on predictive maintenance for industrial phone case manufacturing using machine learning. These experiences gave me the foundation to excel in my placement with GSK and summer work designing Arduino-based escape room puzzles. The Diamond didn't just teach me electronics – it gave me the skills to deliver practical solutions in the real world.