Engineering celebrates placement success
The Faculty of Engineering's employability team marked their one year anniversary by welcoming back placement students with an awards ceremony.
Since opening officially in October 2013, the Employability Suite in the Faculty of Engineering has gone from strength to strength. Twelve months on the Faculty of Engineering Employability Team are celebrating the success of the returning students at the first placement awards ceremony where students working at IBM, Sellafield and National Instruments were awarded for their outstanding achievements as nominated by their employers.
The success from last year has continued, as in the past 12 months the Employability Team this summer sent out over 100 students on industrial placements with companies such as Williams F1, Microsoft, Airbus and TATA. This is more than double the number of students that were welcomed back this summer. The future is looking bright as over 80% of all first years expressed an interest in completing a placement. Students registering for the placement degree all have a dedicated Work Placement Programme delivered in conjunction with the Careers Centre to aid them in their placement search.
The winners of this year’s awards are as follows:
Outstanding Performance on Placement x1 (£100)
- Georgia Hopkin - IT Specialist at IBM (Computing). Georgina demonstrated maturity and professionalism beyond her years and took upon her placement with a real passion. She was the only student that IBM had taken on that self-taught herself technical skills to enable her to lead the design, development and tests on four major applications. Georgina personal development during the placement really stood out – she initially lacked the confidence to speak up in team meetings and recognised that for her to achieve al she wanted she need to overcome this, and 6 months into her placement she was presenting to an auditorium of 100+ professionals talking about the project she had ran. This was judged to meet the “Personal Development” criteria.
Certificate of Achievement x2 (£50)
- Chris Mould - Process Engineer at Sellafield (SCAPE). Chris demonstrated great passion for his work in the Nuclear industry, he continually sought to develop his skills during his placement and his development was evidenced by to quote his manager “an outstanding piece of work” which saw Chris develop a mechanism to support Sellafield Ltd and the UK (Department of Energy & Climate Change) understand its implications on the European OSPAR Radioactive Substances Strategy which was approved for use. This work summarised how several hundred unique streams on the site could be simply categorised into two categories. This was judged to meet the “Outstanding Individual Achievement” criteria.
- Mazvydas Narvidas - Applications Engineering Intern at National Instruments (Elec). Mazvydas went over and above the expectations of his employers, demonstrating a real enthusiasm for his placement for anything that came his way. From having his myRIO project showcased in Italy, to receiving an award for highest customer feedback. He was also part of the Technical Marketing Team for three months where he co-organised the Automated Test Summit the 2nd largest event run in the UK, at which he also presented, and during his time in had an article published in an engineering magazine. Finally he will be returning to University to work as a LABView Ambassador This was judged to meet the “Overall Contribution” criteria.