Work Experience
I am a very, very bad person. I haven’t really made a blog post since I set this site up. I hope to remedy that.
Over the last three weeks I have been doing work experience at the maths department at Cambridge, more specifically I have been working with a project that teaches remotely using videoconferencing called Motivate. It’s a really great idea and although you wonder at first whether the technology will work they’ve actually been doing it since 1999 so it works really well. What they do is get an academic in from a university to give a workshop/talk of varying lengths, some are just a morning whereas some are spread out in sessions over a year, to multiple schools, from across the country and across the world, who then give feedback, do projects or just ask questions. It’s really good and I found a lot of the talks really interesting even though they really varied in target audience. One of the coolest ones was a project that had been running for a year in which researchers at the university were working with secondary school children to collect data on the mixing patterns of children at primary school to simulate how disease would spread. It was a brand new study that had never been done before and had some really fascinating results such as suggesting that for the older years it isn’t unusual for children to mix more with others of their own gender than of their own age. It was lots of fun and it would certainly be amazing job but who knows how soon it will be till I’m back in Cambridge :-p.
In the last three and a bit weeks it hasn’t been entirely working at Cambridge. During the second week from Monday to Thursday I did a headstart course on Systems Engineering at Loughborough University. First of all, before I even start talking about the course, the campus at Loughborough is amazing, it’s the largest single campus in Europe and has the biggest Student Union in the UK. It does have quite a lot of old (as in not that nice rather than fancy archaic) buildings but there’s loads of development going at the moment with lots of building happening over the summer. Now onto the course, I had no idea what Systems Engineering was before I got on this course, all I knew is that it had some sort of electronic aspect to it. It works out that Systems Engineering is all of the other Engineering disciplines (Electronic Engineering, Aerodynamics, Structural Engineering, etc.) rolled into one and it is more about coordinating systems and making them work as a whole and in that way a system can be anything from a supermarket to a mobile. The course has residence in the Electrical engineering department as a lot of systems work has developed historically from past knowledge about purely electrical systems. What the headstart course involved was a big project and then various talks and activities to supplement that. There were around 30 boys on the course and we split into 5 groups of 6 for the project. A great thing we did was a team building evening on the first night and although normally I would sneer at these things it was organised by a company from outside the university and was really well done with a good balance between the mental and physical aspects. The project was to design an air defence system for a country which was at threat from hostile neighbours (imagine the country being a bit like Israel just not with quite as many enemies). Now that was a massive task as we had to design the aircraft down to the airframe and electronics as well as the airbases and everything else, we then had to make a report and give a presentation at the end with it being judged 50/50. The problem with such a massive task is that it’s too much for one person to handle and so we decided from the very beginning to delegate with task such as accounting, electronics, airbases, etc. being split between people and to hold it all together I was unanimously chosen as coordinator (I did put myself forward) although my main task was avionics (the electronics in the plane). It was quite a tight time limit to do it in the two main days we had (the first day was mainly occupied with arriving, getting to know each other and the last day was occupied with the presentations and then we left at lunch) but we managed to finish our report just in time on the Wednesday evening, although I later realised we’d missed out a couple important figures about our planes specifications. Fortunately everything was ship-shape in time for the presentation on Thursday and we managed to do a really hard sell. When it came down to the winner being announced we suspected it to be the clever team (I know this sounds really silly as the teams were picked at random but there was a clever team) but we managed to scoop a win I think because of our, if I might say so myself, fantastic organisation and reasonable price (we factored in a profit of 30%ish compared to other teams’ 5% but still managed to stay well under-budget, to be precise a quarter of the countries annual defence budget). I have to say I’ve gone on slightly but it is the first time in ages I’ve won something and everything’s gone well so I am really happy and slightly less disappointed in myself. I also one a cup for best magician on the course but that was due to my frankly dreadful magic tricks I performed with a magic set left in the common room we used, I think the worst trick was one which relied on a magnet hidden in one of the cards.
Overall, as you might have worked out, I’ve had a really enjoyable holiday so far and it’s nice to see that the real world isn’t nearly as depressing as school.
P.S. Feel free to comment on how arrogant I sounded or any horrendous spelling mistakes