A day in the life of a 2nd Year Biomedical Engineering student

By Varsha Vijay, BEng Biomedical Engineering

What I love about biomedical engineering is that it is such an interdisciplinary field. The course timetable is different term to term and I find that no two days are exactly the same!

Rise and Shine:
My mornings begin with a few pushes of the snooze button so I set my alarms around 7am – much earlier than it needs to be! I commute from home and try to leave the house by 8:30 after getting ready, packing my bag and grabbing some toast to eat on the way. If I haven’t already, I use my train journey to preview the lecture slides that we will be going through.

Lectures:
The academic day begins around 10am, with a module lecture such as Signals and Image Processing. During the lecture I aim to understand what the lecturer is saying and focus on note-making later. All our lectures tend to be two hours long and include a quick break. Luckily, we haven’t been subjected to too many 9am starts so far!

Let’s Grab Lunch:
I try to bring a packed lunch from home as we typically get an hour to eat and travel to the campus we are based at for the afternoon. This often means a refreshing, and sometimes windy, walk across Waterloo Bridge to get from the Waterloo to Strand Campus. There are lots of lunch options including market food and the convenient campus canteens.

Labs and Tutorials:
Consolidating knowledge on the content covered in lectures is mainly done through labs and tutorials, which provides a great opportunity to clarify questions with lecturers. Labs are used for more practical modules like Medical Physics and Programming, whereas the focus of tutorials are to build our problem-solving skills. We generally have one of these 2-hour blocks following lunch.

The end of the Academic Day:
There are around 20 contact hours a week, which leaves me plenty of time for other commitments across King’s such as netball practice and matches or Engineering society socials. Getting involved in student groups is great fun, and a fantastic way to socialise. There are also lots of opportunities to attend career information events and panels in the evenings.