Imperial College was founded as a University of London college of science and technology in 1907, by the amalgamation of three exisiting colleges, City and Guilds College, the Royal College of Science and the Royal School of Mines. Now it also boasts of a medical school having gobbled up those of St Mary's, Paddington, and Charing Cross, Hammersmith, along the way.

What distinguishes Imperial from other universities in Britain? That's right, I said universities. Imperial College is, to all intents and purposes, independent of the other London colleges - running its own research and degree programmmes. But Imperial is dogged in its focus on science and engineering (oh, and medicine - to keep the medics happy). There is a Management School and a Humanities department, but they're not exactly huge. The Royal College of Art and the Royal College of Music are both nearby but there understandably is next to no contact or interaction at the student level! That said, Imperial regularly takes part in the University of London sporting leagues, and the degrees awarded are degrees of the university as a whole.

Imperial students, unsurprisingly, fall into many stereotypes. 70% of the college is male (rising to over 90% for some departments) and there are perennial complaints about this. You'd imagine the 30% of girls to be happy with this situation, but it turns out they aren't totally happy either - it's "quality, not quantity" that ostensibly counts for "girls with brains". Also, with well over of a third of the students coming from abroad, you get to hear students from everywhere babbling away excitedly in all sorts of languages - always a good thing!

Biologists are regarded as Arts students here, and more than one first-year Materials Science student has got there after doing a year of Aeronautical Engineering followed by one of Mechanical Engineering. If you've never met a boring, grungy, unwashed Computing geek before, believe me you'll never want to meet one again after one look in the labs. The Medics look down on everybody else, but then everybody else tends to think they're a stuck-up bunch of losers anyway.

But all's not bad. The very nice Union Bar is (I'm told) the oldest student bar in Britain, though it's changed location since it opened. Imperial has an amazingly high proportion of smart, intelligent people who do a whole lot more than just read books or sit in labs all day long - the college has more student clubs and societies than anywhere else in the country and fields very good teams for all kinds of sports and activities. So, all's not too bad. But the overwhelming intensity of the people might get to you, so beware...

Many great and renowned scientists and public figures have been associated with Imperial College (and its constituents before that). The following is a small representation, and is woefully inadequate.

Thomas Huxley - 19th century biologist, nicknamed Darwin's Bulldog for his passionate defence of his theory of evolution in a notoriously famous 1860 public Oxford debate with Archbishop Wilberforce. Extended and refined Darwin's theory, and presented the first explicit direct evidence for human evolution (never mentioned by Darwin).

William Perkin - 19th century chemist, creator of the first synthetic dye, aniline, in 1856.

H G Wells - Pioneering science-fiction author, writer of (among other works) The Invisible Man, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.

Alexander Fleming - Discovered penicillin (the first antibiotic) in 1928, shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine for the discovery.

Patrick Blackett - Physicist who developed the use of Wilson's cloud chamber, made important discoveries concerning cosmic rays. Awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize for Physics. Wrote widely on social and political effects of atomic weapons, and was chief scientific advisor to the governments of Britian and India.

William Penney - Nuclear physicist and mathematician who led Britain's post-war development of the atomic bomb and supervised the first successful test explosion, after having worked on the American bomb effort during World War II. Was later chief of the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

Denis Gabor - Hungarian electrical engineer who invented holography in 1948 in an attempt to improve electron microscopy, awarded the 1971 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Abdus Salam - Pakistani theoretical physicist who famously put forward his theory of electroweak interaction, the synthesis of electromagnetic and weak interactions, the closest yet towards a Grand Unified Theory of nature. Shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics and founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste.

Other famous people associated with the college include Brian May, guitarist with rock band Queen (graduated in Physics and Mathematics and worked on a PhD in Astronomy), and former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering.