The ‘invaluable experiences’ The Big Bang Competition offers

My project title was ‘improved refugee global shelter’, with the intention to engineer a solution to the overcrowding and poverty found in refugee camps through developing a modular and environmentally conscious shelter and camp system. The final shelter system also provides opportunity for education, skills development and employment for those living in the camp, as well as a gradual approach to shelter that becomes more substantive and humane in protracted refugee scenarios.

Through undertaking this project, I developed my skills in structural engineering and engineering design, but I also had the opportunity to learn more about architectural and ergonomic design, logistics planning and waste management and manufacturing processes.

After an initial application, I was selected to present my work to a panel of judges from Stantec and The Big Bang Competition. This was a fantastic opportunity, and I appreciated the inquisitive and challenging responses that allowed me to properly evaluate my solutions both technically and logistically. This interview was also highly rewarding for myself, and I left it feeling proud of the progress I’d made in both the project and my own engineering skillset. 

After receiving the Stantec Developing Future Communities Award at The Big Bang Competition, I was invited to visit the team at Stantec at their Farringdon office in London. Here, I had the opportunity to meet graduate engineers in the Civil, Structures, Waste Management and Data Science branches of the business. This was a fantastic opportunity to gain an insight into how graduate engineers work, learn and contribute to major projects, and I'm keen to return to Stantec for work experience in the future.

The learnings I took from developing a manufacturing process and user-centred design for this project have been vital on my year in industry placement at Endomagnetics in Cambridge. I’ve been on this placement for 7 months, and I now use concepts regarding material flow, control measures and ergonomics that I developed through my Big Bang Competition project on a daily basis to develop the future of medical devices across the Breast Cancer Care Continuum.

Undertaking a year in industry has also been fantastic fun - being able to take on responsibility for, and apply real-life engineering skills to, medical devices that will improve patient experiences and outcomes this early in my engineering career has been fantastic fun. One of the projects I've been working on, a new surgical instrument set to assist surgeons conducting surgical removal of breast tumours, also recently won a Chicago Athenaeum Museum Good Design Award! Outside of work, I've been able to continue playing sport and music at high levels through Cambridge University. I'd highly recommend school leavers who are keen to gain valuable engineering experience in a gap year to have a look at the EDT's YINI programme.

I'm looking forward to beginning my MEng General Engineering degree studies at Durham University next year and am keen to continue gaining real-life engineering experience through my studies.
 
I’d like to thank all the team at EngineeringUK for their work in running the awards, as well as Krishna Khant, Clare Grimes and Jack Lonsdale at Stantec for providing me with these invaluable experiences! I’d also highly encourage young engineers to use the awards as an opportunity to develop their engineering ideas and interests into fully considered solutions, with the possibility for feedback and national recognition at the end - a quick submission can have benefits more widespread than you might initially think!