Laboratory work is an integral part of the Undergraduate Programmes operated by the School of Electronic Engineering, with laboratory sessions accounting for a significant fraction of your overall timetable at all stages. This work is crucial to the overall educational experience of each engineering student.

This importance is reflected in the status given to laboratory assessment : in general, you must attend all scheduled laboratory sessions, and must complete all related assignments (e.g. logbook reports etc.) satisfactorily, in order to progress to a succeeding stage of the Programme--independently of your performance in all other assessments.

In addition, note that not only are the Laboratory modules assessed in themselves, but the experiments and exercises may also form the basis for questions in related end-of-semseter examinations.

This role of laboratory sessions in your overall assessment is one incentive for you to give this work very careful attention; but even more importantly than that, I would like to stress the opportunities which the laboratory sessions offer.

Engineering (unlike pure science) is not just about discovering or understanding the way the world is : engineering is about changing it--designing, building, maintaining, new products and systems, everything from vending machines to space stations. Becoming an engineer certainly involves studying a large body of theory: but you will never understand this theory--not, at least, in the engineering sense--until you havetested it. And you test a theory by setting up some real system, about which your theories can make certain predictions, and seeing for yourself both how well and how badly your theories work in practice. The latter case is very important: during all the laboratory sessions you do during your undergraduate Engineering Programme, you will probably learn most from those which do not behave as ``expected''--where something ``goes wrong''. These will challenge your understanding of a theory, and also challenge the underlying validity or applicability of the theory itself. Nowhere in an Engineering Programme can we offer you ``absolute truth''; every theory you are exposed to will involve some degree of idealisation relative to the real world, and will therefore have some limited domain of applicability--you should try to remember this, even when it is not stated explicitly.

The mark of a professional engineer is not in the body of theoretical knowledge which she commands (although, of course, she will have such knowledge); it is rather in her ability, firstly to choose an appropriate theory to apply in any particular application; and secondly, and even more importantly, to be aware of the limitations even of the theory she has chosen, and to be constantly willing to reconsider her choice, and even to refine her theoretical understanding when necessary. I say this is the mark of a professional engineer because, in the final analysis, peoples' health, safety, and welfare depend on these abilities. The only way to develop these abilities is to practice; and that is what the laboratory sessions in the programme give you the opportunity to do. Take advantage of them!