As part of Think Up’s Engineering Conversations project we are working with engineers to develop new ways for them to tell their story. Rather than the traditional carrousel of uninspiring Power Point slides, three Expedition engineers were given the challenge of describing a number of the company’s key projects using sketches alone. The students sat in the round while the engineers sat a low table in the middle, and drew their way through the projects, drawing their way through the key structural features for each job.
This method has advantages for both the presenter and audience. The process of drawing gives the presenter time. The pace of the presentation is dictated by the speed of drawing and the process of allows the presenter to think through what they are going to say. The audience gets unprecedented access to the engineer’s thought processes and their perception of the world: a perception characterised the understanding of relationships in 3-dimensional space.
By all accounts the presentation was a great success. The engineers, daunted by the prospect of drawing in front of an audience for a whole hour were surprised by just how quickly the session passed and just how engaged the students were throughout. The students delighted to have had such efforts lavished upon them – a presentation quite unlike the rest that they had seen during their week in London.
Student Studio is designed to help students get the most out of their week spent in an engineering design office. It removes that question of the supervising engineer, uttered in dispair the moment the student walks in through the door, “What am I going to give them to do?” Student Studio is the answer. It is a suite of design projects that work experience students can work through semi-independently during their week in the office. It doesn’t replace shadowing, participating in meetings or going on site; but it does give students a project (a microcosm of a real project) that they can call their own, through which they can demonstrate their own initiative, and to which they can point to and say I did that.
According to Expedition’s Ruth Hopgood-Oates, the company used to have to be quite restrictive of the number of school-aged work experience students it took on because “however much we like having students in the office, it used to take a lot of time out of an engineer’s time to supervise them”. She went on to say, “this year we successfully took on more work experience students than ever before”. Project Engineer Alex McCredie said “it felt good to be actually giving the students something meaningful to do without the burden of having to dream something up myself”.
