On the 14th -16th of February, 10 fellow Bancroftians and I went on a three day course giving us a taste of how STEM can open up a myriad of career options for you in the future. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths- and this course aimed to broaden our minds on the different ways of entering the working world other than the traditional university route. It also gave us first hand chances to meet various individuals working in STEM subjects and in turn they shared their experiences during their time working in specific sectors of these fields.

This three day programme started off in the College of North West London where we met the other 15 students taking part in the course. With friendships soon made we began with a brief talk about the course followed by a taster session on Robotics. We had yet another taster course on Design and Technology, where we designed our own products along with an exclusive tour of the state of the art DT workshop. Following this, we were given a talk about apprenticeships- an alternative to the standard university route. We had a chance to talk to five apprentices that studied at the college and talked about how they got into apprenticeships and how their experience was going so far. This was extremely interesting as I had no idea what apprenticeships actually were and that you could actually go down this route!

On the second day we travelled to the University of Westminster early in the morning. After a brief introduction, we started with an activity raising awareness of the different courses that branch out of the four core subjects in STEM. In my group, we did Engineering, and found 60 odd courses surrounding engineering! We then started our first taster session involving experimenting with the UNREAL gaming software programme. This session had us programming the graphics, colours and textures of items you see in an actual game, and also the motion of objects in the game itself. We then had a talk on presentation skills, and how to speak effectively in front of an audience. This was extremely insightful and helpful for the future when we might find ourselves in that scenario. Then, we went on our second taster course surrounding augmented reality- programming a cartoon man to move on a selected surface. This day really opened our eyes to mainly the technological aspect of STEM.

The third and final day involved travelling to the Balfour Beatty construction site at Abbey Wood. After a short introduction about Crossrail, Europe’s biggest construction engineering project, we broke off into small groups to play the ‘Spaghetti Tower Challenge’. This is where you had 20 pieces of spaghetti, a marshmallow, a rope and some tape. The objective was to build the tallest tower possible- and my team won! We then had an exclusive tour of the Crossrail building site and the new station being built. Furthermore we had a chance to speak to five different engineers about their experiences in the field. In the afternoon we had another task-‘the bridge building challenge’ where we had to build a bridge out of four pieces of paper, fit to hold as many mars bars as possible. Lastly, we had to spend time in our groups, preparing a presentation on our experiences at the STEM course. We did this to ultimately achieve our Bronze Industrial Cadets Award.

This course has given me insight into the careers STEM can ultimately lead to and different ways of approaching them. I have thoroughly enjoyed this course, made some new friends and I look forward to applying for the Year11 Inspire STEM course next year!

By Anya Shah, Bancroft’s School