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- Two of our students (Lauren, in Year 9, and Ellie, in Year 10), spent three days of their summer holidays attending the Smallpeice Trust’s 50th Anniversary ‘Engineering Experience’. This was a residential trip, based at the University of Southampton, held in early August.
- This is Laurens account of her trip:
From the 2nd to the 4th of August I was lucky enough attend Smallpeice’s ‘Engineering Experience’, where I had a great time and made new friends for life.
Before I begin, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce you to the Smallpeice Trust. For 50 years, they have been giving young people everything they need to fuel their passion for engineering, helping to make their big ideas a reality with the help of parents, teachers, universities and corporate partners. The Smallpeice Trust was founded in 1966 by Dr Crosby D P Smallpeice Lathe. Following his success, Dr Smallpeice donated £1.6 million of his own fortune into the setting up the Smallpeice Trust to give young people the support they need to bring their big ideas to life through STEM too. The Smallpeice Trust run different experiences for young people to encourage them to take up their dreams and get a taste of work with in engineering.
On arrival at Southampton University everyone gathered in Glen Eyre Hall where we were given a programme of the week, a name tag, a key, a pen and a pencil. Once everyone was there we took our bags over to the apartments where we were staying. We then went over to a lecture hall where we were split in to our groups and we introduced ourselves to each other. We then had to work as a team to make a hat out of 5 pieces of paper and tape - my group made a top hat with a boat on the top. One person from each group then had to wear the hat and stand in front of everyone to show off our work. After my embarrassment we watch a personation on how the Smallpeice Trust started and about what we were going to be doing.
Four different companies then gave a personation about their company:
- Transport for London are a multimillion pound company that controls all the transport in, to and from London.
- Land Rover and Jaguar are, of course, the massive company that make land rovers and jaguar cars.
- Lloyds Register (also known as ‘LR’), is a company that employs engineers to maintain oil tanks solar farms, wind turbine farm and many more. They take on apprentices from the age of 18 where they teach you how to escape a helicopter that is crashing and also how to fly a helicopter and many more skills you may not learn anywhere else.
- Cyber Security UK Challenge are a company that try to get young people in to cyber security and use hacking for good and also help the CIA and Her Majesties Secret Serveries employ new agents to break codes and hack in to systems.
Half way through the day we stopped our hard work and had lunch and then dinner. Later on in the day we then went back to our rooms where we got ready to go bowling. After bowling we went back to our rooms where we then got ready for bed.
The next morning, I woke up had a shower and got dressed just before a fire alarm went off! I grabbed my key and headed out the door and down the stairs where I joined everyone else, which included many people who had just woken up! Lucky there was no actual fire and it turned out someone left the door open while having a shower. We went back to our rooms to finish getting ready and then headed to breakfast.
After breakfast we started our first activity – mine was with ‘cyber security’, where we learnt how to hack computers, and learnt about different codes. We then had lunch and then continued with this. After this we went to our second activity which for me was with Transport for London, where we learnt more about what they do. After dinner we all joined together where we watched a film. After the film we went back to our rooms and got ready for bed.
The next morning was our last day so we packed up our and handed in our keys. We then went to breakfast and went to our activity where we mapped out our own train tracks in our groups. After lunch we had the challenge to build a cable car which had to hold the most weight and be the fastest down a piece of string. After this we all came back together where we were giver a certificate and said our goodbye before walking to get our bags and going to the hall where we were dropped off on the first day to be picked up by our parents.
If I had the opportunity to go again I would as I had such a great time and meet some incredible people. These people I will never forget as they are so lovely and maybe so different to me. They are also from very different parts of the UK, with some being Welsh, some from London, and of course, my friends from Portsmouth.
Lauren, Year 9
