We have endowed subject funds for 16 of the 28 courses offered by the College. However, Engineering is a glaring omission! Despite being one of the largest subjects at Queens’ (18 undergraduates and approximately 8 postgraduates are admitted each year), Engineering has not yet been endowed. We seek to change this.
We recently launched a campaign to raise £400,000 for The Subject Fund in Engineering, which will provide a total annual sum of around £12,000 to support our undergraduate and postgraduate students. These funds are allocated at the discretion of the Director of Studies in Engineering, Prof Andrew Gee, to provide financial assistance with the following:
- Books and other study materials / equipment
- Attendance at conferences, lectures, and other events
- Research expenses
- Subject-related travel expenses
- Dissertation-binding costs
We have raised £80,000 so far.
Although Queens' does not currently have an Engineering Subject Fund, since 2015 our undergraduates have benefited from a temporary arrangement made possible by more efficient, innovative College-based teaching, with the cost savings diverted to a financial support facility. The intervening eight years have seen a high demand for this facility, which we now wish to endow in perpetuity and extend to postgraduate students. An Engineering Subject Fund would help our students meet the costs of books, equipment, supracurricular courses and academic travel. Moreover, freed from financial pressures and the consequential need to seek paid employment during vacations, our undergraduates would instead be encouraged to pursue supracurricular projects and participate in social enterprises of a technical nature.
Prof Andrew Gee, Queens’ Fellow, Engineering DoS, and Finance Tutor
Angus Chisholm is an Engineering student who benefitted from Queens' funding last year. With support from the College, Angus spent the summer of 2023 on a Summer Humanitarian Academy, organised jointly by Lingnan University in Hong Kong and Batangas State University in the Philippines. The photograph below shows Angus meeting the Badjao people to talk about their water supply. With feedback from the villagers, Angus went on to improve an existing water testing kit supplied by Cambridge-based Waterscope.
We first spent time visiting local communities; for my group’s project - improvement of the Waterscope kit - as well other projects, including improvement of a chocolate coated banana chip manufacture process and improvement of a solar powered irrigation pump. This was a particularly eye opening experience in which we were immersed in local culture (especially the customary five full meals we were given a day!) as well as having an opportunity to meet the people who would be the users of such a test kit and who we would be designing for. Across about a week we went through the entire design process - one that I had been taught as part of the coursework in my first year of engineering. We developed ideas and arrived at a final prototype, which we presented to local officials and received their feedback. From this we finalised our design and presented it to members of the BSU, Lingnan and local government officers... The six weeks were truly incredible, and I will be forever grateful to have been able to have this experience.
Angus Chisholm (2022), Engineering undergraduate student
The Subject Fund in Engineering will ensure that more of our students are able to participate in supracurricular activities and help them reach their full potential. We're incredibly proud of what our Engineering graduates go on to achieve: Emilie Pauwels (2019), for instance, achieved a double 1st in Engineering and is now studying for a PhD in Biochemical Engineering at Duke University in the US.
Professor Andrew Gee with Engineering graduands in 2022 (left) and Angus meeting the Badjao people to talk about their water supply (below)
