Founded in 1850, Australia’s oldest university The University of Sydney is admired as one of the most prestigious universities in Asia, and beyond. Its Engineering and Information Technology faculty is ranked in the top 10 in the Asia Pacific region; and as one of the world’s top 40.

Since its foundation, The University of Sydney has produced prime ministers, Nobel laureates, Oscar winners, business leaders, medical pioneers, intellectuals and activists. The roll call in the fields of science and engineering is no less impressive with the likes of Nobel Laureate Dr. Edward Appleton for Physics in 1947 and Nobel Laureate Sir John Cornforth for Chemistry in 1975 having graced the halls of the University of Sydney.

University of Sydney

Pic: University of Sydney.

Under the university’s Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies, students are offered diverse course offerings covering areas including robotics, steel structures, space, power, energy technologies, project management, sustainability and high performance computing, medical imaging, biomedical engineering and much more. The University recognizes that engineering can be a broad and daunting prospect for new students and offers a flexible first year program that allows students to discover the area that suits them best.

As an engineering and IT student, one may choose from a wide choice of subjects, which are offered by the five schools run by the Engineering and IT Faculty. The biggest school among them is the School of Aerospace, Mechanical, and Mechatronic Engineering, which is ranked best of its kind in New South Wales and third in Australia by the Australia Education Network.

The other four are the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, famous for being research-intensive; the School of Civil Engineering, focusing on structures and geomechanics right now but transitioning to include sustainability, climate change, and renewable energy; the School of Electrical and Information Engineering; and last, the School of Information Technologies, which offers courses accredited by the Australian Computer Society (ACS) mainly in the fields of algorithms and applications, enterprise computing, human centered computing, and IT applications in health care.

From 2012, The University of Sydney will offer two new degrees in its Project Management Program; they are the Bachelor of Project Management and the Master of Project Leadership. These two programs are able to come into being thanks to the university’s already well-known and highly regarded Master of Project Management program, which has been accredited by the Project Management Institute Global Accreditation Centre for Project Management Education Programs (GAC) and endorsed by the Australian Institute of Project Management.

Across the five schools, students can rest assured that they will be learning from the very best. Here are just a few of the faculty:

* NASA astronaut Dr. Greg Chamitoff now teaches at the School of Aerospace, Mechanical, and Mechatronic Engineering as an adjunct professor.

* Dr. Dylan Lu from the School of Electrical and Information Engineering is conducting the groundbreaking research of reducing excess heat in electrical appliances. His goal is to improve the electricity efficiency rate of electrical devices from the current 88 per cent to 95 percent.

* Dr. Robert Minasian from the School of Electrical and Information Engineering has his paper “Photonic signal processing of microwave signals” ranked the top 1 per cent most cited papers in his field worldwide.

The University of Sydney’s students are also making waves in engineering circles. Take, for example, John van Rooyen and Marko Stankovic, whose redesign of the Anzac Bridge won the popular vote in a corporate engineering competition, each receiving $2,000 as a cash prize. Also, Engineering and IT Faculty Australian Centre for Field Robotics graduates’ company Marathon Targets scored a $57 million contract with the US Marine Corps for its life-like “T2″ target robots this year.

University of Sydney Engineering

Pic: University of Sydney.

As an established research institute, the University of Sydney offers competitive research facilities that serve to accommodate its engineering and IT students’ enquiring minds and creative potential. For example, the university has a 5.2 million volume library. Furthermore, with the highest research grant income per member of academic staff of all engineering schools in Australia, the most advanced laboratory equipment and technologies are available for research as well as teaching.

The University of Sydney is home to approximately 40,000 students, with about 9,000 coming from outside Australia. These large numbers on both counts indicate the vibrant and diverse culture at the university. Not only will students be exposed to different viewpoints in classes, they will also have the opportunity to socialize with people of different backgrounds and interests outside of class.

Finally, with its museums and galleries, sport facilities, architecture, food, and rich cultural history, the city of Sydney offers an unforgettable student experience.

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