BHGS Engineers of the Future

BHGS Year 9s excelled by completing their Bronze Industrial Cadets Programme over a twelve week period.

BHGS Engineers of the Future

On Monday 24th June, Bishop’s 2 teams, the Innovators and Medtech, delivered their projects at a celebration and Awards event hosted by the Engineering Development Trust at Watford Boys’ Grammar School. We set up our stands showing our projects, with our models, portfolios and research we had done over the past 12 weeks.

Through the Industrial Cadets scheme, we were able to learn many skills such as public speaking amongst others. This allowed us to confidently express our ideas and opinions and back it up with the weeks of research we had done. All valuable skills for our futures!

Both teams found that going to the celebration event was a really motivating and interesting experience. As participants, mentors, and business partners gathered to honour the Industrial Cadets achievements and hard work, the venue was humming with enthusiasm. The host of the event greeted everyone warmly and talked about the importance of supporting future talent, as well as the impact of the Industrial Cadets programmes on engineering and inspiring interest in STEM in the participants.

Throughout the day, we were introduced to some of the 2024 sponsors of Industrial Cadets. They gave a variety of talks and helped us to work out whether we wanted to pursue a career in STEM and how to achieve our goals. More importantly, the message that came across was that it was alright to fail at something- all you do is dust yourself off and move on.

We mingled around the venue, taking it in turn to see other schools’ presentations whilst presenting our own ideas. We swapped after about twenty minutes so we could each have an equal time explaining our project too.

As it was a very hot day, we enjoyed lunch on the balcony watching a cricket match between the MCC and Watford Boys’. Very relaxing and civilised. Dr Lota and Mr Short enjoyed this too, especially explaining the weird nuances of cricket!

Furthermore, the event provided many possibilities for networking, enabling participants to connect with industry leaders, employers, and peers. These discussions encouraged participants to feel friendly with one another and to share knowledge. Our group loved the chance to talk with others who share our enthusiasm for engineering and creativity. The best aspect was the project exhibitions. Observing the diverse variety of projects that people around us had completed gave us a comprehensive awareness of emerging trends and existing industry practices. Our understanding of the real-world uses of theoretical knowledge has been improved. Through conversations, we were able to enhance our communication and presentation skills during the event. By explaining our projects to visitors and answering their questions, we improved our ability to convey sophisticated technical knowledge in an understandable way.

Finally, we sat down as a school, ready to hear the results. Three awards were on offer and both of our teams came runners up. One of us even won the Best Project of the Year. The Innovators were runners-up for the Innovative Project Award and Medtech was runner-up for Best Teamwork Award. Medtech, to our delight and excitement, won the Best Project of the Year Award in London and South East out of forty-nine participants! The citation of this award read as:

“This was an outstanding report and presentation. The team conducted comprehensive research, which gave them a great platform from which to develop their project. The presentation was delivered confidently and professionally, clearly demonstrating the great team dynamics that existed within the team. All team members showed an exceptional passion for the project and the assessors commented that the success of the team was a result of how well they worked together. All assessors were unanimous in nominating this team for the project of the year award.”

Our two Bishops teams did extremely well and were both very proud of what we all had achieved throughout our twelve week program. We came away inspired and enriched. We gained critical communication skills, and we learned valuable details about standards in the industry. The support and encouragement we have received, together with the sense of community, have increased our desire to create and succeed. We are ecstatic to have had this opportunity to contribute to the future of engineering. We wear our Bronze Industrial Cadets badged with pride.

We all would like to thank Dr Lota and Mr Short for their time, advice and encouragement. We would also like to thank Barhale Construction for their sponsorship, mentoring and for keeping us motivated.

Haniya K and Martha C (Year 9  Industrial Cadets 2023-24)