Chemical Engineering with Foundation Year

Chemical engineering is the discipline that bridges chemistry and large-scale industrial production: it asks how the reactions and transformations discovered in the laboratory can be made to work safely, efficiently and economically at the scale needed to supply the world with fuels, materials, medicines, food and clean water. It involves the design and optimisation of industrial processes, the modelling of heat and mass transfer, the management of reaction kinetics at scale, and the engineering of the physical equipment through which these processes run. It is a discipline with enormous scope, sitting at the intersection of energy, environment, health and manufacturing.

At the University of Surrey, this four-year full-time degree includes a foundation year, providing a supported and mathematically enriched entry point for students who benefit from additional preparation before the main engineering programme begins. You will build from the fundamentals of chemistry and mathematics into the core of chemical engineering: process thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer, reactor design and process control. Surrey integrates digital and computational skills throughout the programme, building confidence with the modelling tools and data analysis methods that employers in the chemical and process industries increasingly expect from new graduates.

Typical entry is around 104 UCAS tariff points.

Chemical engineering graduates are among the most employable of all engineering disciplines. The process industries are vast, spanning oil and gas, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, food processing, water treatment, renewable energy and advanced materials, and all of them employ chemical engineers in design, operations, process safety and research and development roles. Many graduates also move into consultancy, finance, environmental management and public sector roles in energy and sustainability policy.

Further study via taught masters or doctoral research is common, particularly for those who want to specialise in process safety, biotechnology, sustainable energy or materials engineering.