By Muhammad Shuja
This blog will give you an insight about the
Global Engineering Challenge in general, something engineering undergraduates
take up in their first year at Sheffield.
This will be the time you realise the impact
engineers and engineering itself has on the real-word and how much the world is
in need of engineers for various aspects of the industry, all the way from
healthcare to agriculture.
Teams of 5 or 6 students from different
engineering disciplines will be asked to come up with a solution to real-life
problem, which they have to present to an audience of other teams, a
facilitator and some alumni of the university. Each team is assigned a work
space in a hub where they have a facilitator to guide them through the
decision-making progress. This seems daunting at first but a lot of support is
offered to students in the form on introductory lectures and first hand help
from facilitators since the university realizes that the students haven’t
transformed into perfect engineers to come up with solutions to such tough
problems after just one semester. The whole point of GEC is to allow you to
push your comfort zone through working in a multi-disciplinary team where you
work with total strangers from different backgrounds and experiences. You deal
with both the merits and hurdles of this situation, a skill which is very
necessary after graduation since this is what engineers do a lot. All team
members get to be the leader for a day which allows to boost leadership and
communication skills as you have to work with people with different leading
strategies. There are awards for the "Best Professional Behaviour" and the "Best
Communicated Solution" at the end of the week.
Another very interesting part of GEC is the Alumni
Day. This is when you get to meet graduates from the University who are working
for various firms in the country and get to know their experiences and explore
various opportunities for summer placements or industrial placement years. The
best thing about this event is that you get to have face-to-face information
about a particular company from someone who is currently working there, which
allows you to make a sound decision when it comes to applying for placements or
even graduate jobs.
To summarize, the Global Engineering Challenge
allows you to work in a multi-disciplinary team, work on a real-life project,
learn about different branches of engineering, have an experience to talk about
in interviews or job applications, and explore various employment opportunities
… all of this in just one week!
I’ve posted a link to this year’s GEC website
where you can get an idea about the sort of projects students work on and also
a video about this year’s GEC.
GEC Website
GEC Website
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