Employer Fest: Engineering

By Muhammad Shuja

This blog is to let you know about Employer Fest, one of the many career-based events the University hosts every year for its students.

Struggling to find placements or have too many options to decide a graduate career? The answer to every question you might have regarding careers, Employer Fest – your chance to get hands on information about placements or graduate roles through a series of events from February till March. Though the University hosts an Employer Fest for each Faculty, I’ll be talking specifically about Engineering.

Regardless of whether you’ve secured a placement or have no idea what the word means (I’m pretty sure it’s something you take when you’ve got the flu), Employer Fest will help you through each stage of the process. There’s loads of workshops from the Careers Service, regarding all the options you can consider, a year-long placement if you want to get hands-on experience of the industry, a summer-placement if you don’t want a gap from studies, or perhaps a placement in a country abroad which is quite an experience in itself. Furthermore, there’s lecturers from staff working at various firms who give you an idea about the application process, to give you extremely vivid information narrowed down to specific firms. The firms are multinational firms who are leaders of their specific fields. I’m talking about Google, Apple, Accenture, PWC etc. You can have the event tailored to your requirements. For instance, international students might want to know more about immigration policies before they get searching for placements. The JobShop runs regular workshops for exactly that. For finalists, you might be more interested in graduate positions than placements. For postgraduate students, you might want to look for postgraduate placements and you can find specific event to suit your needs. For those of you who are nervous of performance issues during interviews and assessments, there’s a great load of events from both employers and from the Careers Service who will be more than happy to give you one on one advice about interviews, assessments, CVs and absolutely any worries you might have. Last but not the least, the main highlight of Employer Fest: Engineering is the Engineering Placements Networking Event. Employers from world-class firms all gathered around to ask any questions you might have – applications, interviews, the work environment, further opportunities or even how much you can earn (*ahm ahm* I sense a twinkling of the eye)! To conclude, with a whole month jam-packed with career-based events, you’ll definitely maximize your chances to get an awesome placement to earn some dolla while you do what you love!

Global Engineering Challenge 2016

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