Royal Academy of Engineering

I wrote back in April about an award I received from the Royal Academy of Engineering. Two weeks ago, just before the start of Freshers’ Week, I got to make use of this for the first time with a weekend conference in Birmingham where I got the chance to meet the other winners from top engineering departments across the country and attend a series of personal development workshops. It was absolutely brilliant! I met loads of fantastic people and it was really inspiring to find out what they’d been up to and how they were planning to spend the money. I met a few others that want to go to Japan as well, so hopefully we might be able to organise something together! The workshops were really useful too, covering a range of subjects such as presentations, creativity, teamwork, career progression and manufacturing. There were also talks from several very senior figures from the UK engineering industry, including the Managing Director of Centrica, who all gave interesting insights into their careers and tips to how we can all achieve our career goals. I came away really buzzing and can’t wait to put my new found plans into action. I may apply to use some of the funds to go to the European Young Engineers Conference in Salerno, Italy next month, but still deciding on that one!

Straight after that came Freshers’ Week and first stop was helping out with ECS’s Jumpstart programme. I’ve blogged on this last year, so I won’t go into too much detail, but I had a great team and we all had a lot of fun. We managed to get some bonus points for pictures with some policemen, but sadly not with the Mayor. Big congratulations go out to the team that managed that! However, well done most of all to my group as they not only managed to win the award for adding the most places onto the virtual Southampton map, but also won the overall prize for best storyboard! So congratulations to Henry Kennedy, Fedros Galatopoulos and new student blogger Sally Shi!