Yr12 Engineers' December Residential

In the last week of term before the Christmas holidays, myself and 9 other students had the opportunity to go on a two-day residential to Birmingham University. We were the two teams of 5 representing the school for this year’s Engineering Education Scheme. In the several weeks building up to the trip, we had been working on our projects with our partnered companies, My group is working with Cummins and the other group is working with General Electric.

In the two days  at Birmingham University, my group worked on transferring the CAD designs (which we had prepared in advance) into physical parts and this required many hours of machining. In preparation we had designed a piece of hardware as a proof of concept to a solution to our problem, each member had their own section and mine was the base. I loved being in the workshop as I am fascinated by the machinery and it was cool to see it in action. Once the parts had been machined, we took the time to fill out our report as we must write a professional document explaining all our successes, failures, thought processes and concepts. One of our team members did an exceptional job of creating the document rules so that the file would be written in a consistent style.

The evening meal was a nice Christmas roast and came with crackers and all. Furthermore, on the second evening before we went home, we had the opportunity to visit the German Christmas market and that was pretty cool.

Blake Rowan, Year 12