A Taste of The World at the University of Sheffield

Written By: Rishi Parwani

Every year the International Students’ Committee puts on a myriad of spectacular events ranging from the International Cultural Evening, World Week and most recently; The World Food Festival. This year, 12 societies took part and stepped up to showcase their dishes to an audience of hungry students, myself included. World Food Fest is one of my favourite events by the ISC because as I’m sure you may have gathered by now from my blog posts, I’m a massive foodie!

How the World Food Festival works is quite simple. The event takes place over a two-day period and all the participating societies are in competition with each other to win us over with their national delicacies. So I visited on the Saturday and the participating societies on the day were:

• Malaysian Society
• Romanian Society
• Hungarian Society
• Arab Society
• Filipino Society
• Sri Lankan Society
• Sheffield Market Society

Upon arrival at the Octagon Centre where the event was taking place, I was stumped because it’s been a long time since I’ve been presented with so many options for a meal. Such is life for a student, don’t you think? I spent the first 15 minutes walking around getting an idea of what I should eat which wasn’t an easy feat at all.

After a brainstorming session consisting of mental pros-and-cons lists (just kidding, I’m not crazy), I finally decided to have a main course meal from the Sri Lankan Society. Our friends from Sri Lanka were serving Fried Rice with Prawn Curry which was spectacular. I was so lost in the bursting flavours of this dish that I only remembered to get a picture of it after I had finished eating all the prawns.

My craving for dessert lead me to the Filipino Society, who were serving a Mango Float cake for dessert. This was essentially a cake consisting of a sweet mango cream with crushed digestive biscuits and I can’t emphasise how good it was. It was genuinely my favourite dish from the entire event and I’m definitely going to be spamming the Filipino Society Facebook page for their recipe! My photos definitely don’t do it justice but you’ll just have to trust me on this one.

Still craving for more, I paid a visit to the Arab Society because having grown up in the Middle East, I absolutely love eating Arabic food. I was over-the-moon to discover that they were saying Um-Ali, a traditional Arabian dessert that combines the creaminess of bread pudding and cinnamon nut stuffing of baklava. Its warm and soft texture transported me back home. Kudos to Arab Society!

By this point I was absolutely stuffed to eat more from the other societies but both Romanian and Hungarian society had some excellent dishes on offer, not to mention their desserts which looked incredible.

I rounded off my food-eating marathon with a smoothie from the smoothie-stall run by the Sheffield Market Society, a brand new society that is in contact with local markets and sources fresh ingredients. There was a huge variety of smoothies to choose from however after the amount of food I had just consumed, I decided to go down a healthier alley and tried the banana smoothie which was so refreshing.
So there you have it. The amalgamation of cultures and cuisine at the Food Festival just supports how much I love studying here in Sheffield. The international exposure at this university is second-to-none and it just goes to show that an engineering degree at this university is so much more than you can ever imagine. A massive thank you to the ISC for pulling off such a fantastic event!

Engineering You’re Hired! Or one step closer to being hired! - by Rishi Parwani

Sheffield is one of the very few universities in the country to offer a project week devoted to further developing our acquired engineering skills. ‘Engineering You’re Hired’ is the second year equivalent to the ‘Global Engineering Challenge’ which has been highlighted by my fellow ambassador, Muhammad Zainudin in a previous blog post. In this post, brought to you by yours truly, I’ll be sharing with you my experience of taking part in EYH.  

What does the week involve you ask so curiously? Essentially, we are put into multi-disciplinary teams consisting of engineers from different disciplines and given a project to which we have to propose a solution in the form of a pitch to a company who would fund the project. My team consisted of Mechanical, Electrical and Electronics, Information Technology and Business as well as Aerospace Engineers and we were asked to design a commercial electric or hybrid aircraft in response to the rise in use of hydrocarbons in the commercial aviation industry.

The project brief was open ended which really allowed us to explore many different conceptual designs. This was where our creative juices flowed best and the Aerospace geek in me was so excited to be part of such an enthralling project. Our first day consisted of coming up with initial ideas as well as considering different factors (i.e. Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental) – this really helped us in deciding what we wanted in our final design and what we had to prioritise in order to ‘get the funding’ for our final presentation at the end of the week.

What I really appreciated about this project week and my given topic was that it genuinely gave me such a good insight into the career that I’m about to launch myself into after I graduate. I’ve always been fascinated by the Aerospace industry and taking part in EYH really opened my eyes to how conservative the industry can be which is no surprise given the safety record commercial aviation currently possesses. Not to mention how costly it is to get an aircraft into service. This week was all about researching the specifics and on average we learnt that it takes over 15 years from initially designing an aircraft to its first flight with total investments upwards of £6bn! I found this fascinating as I never really delved into specifics of costs and investments required for aircraft manufacture.

Without boring you too much with the technical details, our final design incorporated a blended wing body which is essentially an aircraft which has the wings integrated into the fuselage. They look like UFOs from certain angles and are really quite fantastic dramatically reducing fuel consumption (by about 15% which is A LOT in this industry) which is one of the main reasons we pitched this as our final design.

Every day of the week consisted of working hard on our final designs competing with other groups to be ‘granted the funding’ as well partaking in presentations in the form of a Boardroom. This would consist of a short 2-3-minute presentation so that our facilitators could monitor our progress throughout the week as well as ask us about designs and why we’ve chosen them as such. On the Wednesday, an industrial mentor partook in the Boardroom session and our team was selected for being the ‘Most Professional’ which really did motivate us for pressing on with the rest of the week.

Even though we didn’t win the best pitch in the end, my team and I had a great week learning more about the commercial aviation industry, coming up with the final design as well as refining our engineering skills. It was a pleasure working with them and getting to know them. I genuinely enjoyed being able to apply what I learnt in lectures and am even more excited about the prospect of being an Aerospace Engineer in industry as a result of EYH. My career in Aerospace is one step closer to taking off.