Application · BEng Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering with Foundation Year · Middlesex University, Hendon
Engineering, from the CAD file to the factory floor.
BEng Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering with Foundation Year.
Robotics hardware I print and assemble myself, a full CAD and drawing package submitted to standard, and nine years of walking Chinese factory floors. What I do not yet have is the engineering education to put underneath it.
Why this course, specifically
I have been going back to Shenzhen since 2017. Nine years, building relationships with Chinese factories directly, from the second visit onwards. The most recent trip was twelve days in August 2026.
So I know factories from the floor. Tolerance, tooling, design for manufacture, what a line looks like when it is running badly, what a supplier will quietly change if you do not specify it. What I do not know is how to design properly for them, and I have gone as far as reverse engineering that from the outside takes anyone.
That is the gap this course closes. Middlesex teaches automation on Festo modular production systems running Siemens S7-1200 and S7-1500 controllers, in Ritterman. The robotics and automation lab in Hatchcroft runs UR10 and UR5 arms, an ABB, Baxter, Turtlebots and Ned2. The design engineering lab has water jet cutting, CNC milling and CMM reverse engineering. I have stood on the floors that first lab is a model of.
I am applying for the route with the foundation year deliberately. I have no Level 3 qualification of any kind and I would rather build the mathematics properly than bluff my way past it.
Middlesex publishes that it welcomes mature candidates without formal qualifications who can demonstrate relevant experience and ability. I would like nine years of manufacturing relationships, supplier negotiation and design for manufacture assessed on that basis. Not to replace the foundation year. As evidence that I will finish it.
Nine years of factory floors
Not one trip. A working relationship with Chinese manufacturing, built visit by visit since 2017, and still running.
Photographs from the trips are added to this section as they are selected.
What I can already do, and where to check
The record, stated plainly
Qualifications
IGCSE, 2012. Mathematics C, English Literature C, First Language English E. No Level 3 qualification of any kind. This is why I am applying to the route that includes a foundation year.
Higher education so far
2025/26, Year 1 of BSc Product Design and Technology at London South Bank University, admitted as a mature student with no Level 3. Teaching year completed. Not all assessments completed. Results are not yet published.
The pattern
The pattern is specific and it is testable. The one module I did well in was the one where a tutor was reachable for an hour a week before the deadline. Where that hour did not exist, nothing was submitted at all. Not late, not weak, nothing. An hour of structured contact was the entire difference between a finished engineering package and a blank.
Assessment
Formally assessed on 13 May 2026, after every semester two deadline had already passed. The report confirms dyslexia and documents a profile consistent with ADHD, with formal ADHD assessment now under way privately. The Student Loans Company closed the funding application that follows an assessment on 12 August 2026, because the academic year had ended.
What I would ask you to weigh
Everything on this page was made before any of that was diagnosed or supported. I am not asking to skip a stage. I am asking to start at the right one, with the maths taught properly from the beginning.
To the course director.
I will come to Hendon at no notice, bring the drawings and the hardware, and answer anything you want to ask about either.
I would rather be judged on what I can make than on three IGCSEs I sat in 2012.
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Application for BEng Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering with Foundation Year, Middlesex University.