I originally came to university planning to do Chemistry but in my first year I had to take another option as well as Chemistry. So I took Materials Science because it seemed to fit in quite well with the course. In my second year I had to again to take a supplementary option. I chose Materials Science and planning to do Chemistry in my final year. But as the year went on I found Materials Science more and more interesting and Chemistry more and more boring. And I appreciated the hands-on and sort of real world view which Materials takes, so I decided to study that on my third year.

When I got the application forms I didn’t actually know anything about it until that point, didn’t know it existed as a field of study and I got – oh Physics, Chemistry, Maths I know all them, I’ll do them. And there’s something else, Materials Science, that looks interesting – and picked that. I didn’t know anything about it!

Basically I hadn’t actually heard of Materials Science before I went to Uni. I was basically influenced by all second years who were saying, it was a choice between Materials and Geology and they were saying ‘Right, you should do Materials’ and others were saying ‘You should do Geology’. I had a look through the course and I thought Geology is basically looking at rocks and that wasn’t too interesting and it’s just colours, so Materials is looking at the mechanics of materials and why they apply to the living world.

I think probably the most interesting one is relating the theory to real life. So you learn something in the lectures and then you come out and say, you know, we are learning about liquid crystals and how light is bent or rotated by liquid crystals. And you come out of your practical and you see it works. It just amazes me sometimes how it works.

I quite like how you get lot of different science in it. It’s applied to a fairly limited set of situations but it takes in aspects of Chemistry and Physics and in some cases even Biology as well.

You get lots of experiments where you dip stuff in liquid nitrogen and then smash it up. Or bending metal with large hammers, heating things and then cooling them. Stretching things until they break. The amount of stuff you break in one year is probably more than in any other degree. You can go home and hear people say things like “Oh yes I’m doing a biological subject and got to make a cell ... to move slightly today”. I got to smash something up!

Everything’s made of a material and as you like walk around I know it’s a bit geeky but you can like look at stuff and go ‘I know how that’s made‘.

In like loads of ways, I mean like from cars to buildings and stuff. Everywhere you look you can see different materials and once you study you kind of see why things are built the way they are, and why things are made out of what they are. It kind of gives you a different perspective when you are looking at things.