This semester 16 of our BSc students have returned from a year spent working in companies and labs – they do this having already spent two years studying in lectures and labs at Surrey. The talks were good, as always, and as always the range of topics were very broad. I saw half the talks (I was in one of the two parallel sessions).

Some students did scientific research, on topics from harnessing the bacterial metabolism of sugar to generate electricity, to transistors (a fundamental component of all modern electronics) made from molecules.

Others did more engineering. From one of our students, I learnt how oil companies look for oil under the sea. Basically they send sound shock waves through the sea and through the rock underneath. These sound waves bounce off discontinuities in the rock – where one layer of rock ends and another begins, and so the speed of the sound wave changes. By analysing the sound waves coming back, they map out the rock formations deep below the seabed, and find likely pockets of oil-bearing rock.

This relies on different rocks have different values of property called impedance. Only last Friday I said to the first years in my tutorial group, how widely applicable impedances are. I felt a warm glow of self-congratulation when our student talked about it being important for his year working in the oil industry.

Other students did more IT stuff. One took his department from the dark ages of XP into the modern world of Windows 7, and did a lot else. Another looked pricing of big computers, but his findings were confidential. Bit of a shame as we are buying some computer servers soon.

They had all enjoyed their year, and so in the language of the students in the new E4 series they had made good GLCs not PLCs.