Insight into STEM at Computacenter
Industrial cadet teams learn more about STEM at Computacenter to celebrate Women in Engineering Day
The two teams arrived at Computacenter excited and ambitious to learn more about STEM. The girls were given passes and were shown a presentation room by the host of the event at Computacenter where the teams would be spending most of their time in. They began with a quick presentation about what Computacenter is, what the company does and about the host and her co-worker and how they got here. The presentation was very informative and it already taught the girls that they didn’t need a career in STEM to work at a large Tech based company such as Computacenter. You need people in different departments to work different jobs that don’t require a background in STEM such as Sales, Marketing, content creation, etc.
After the presentation, we were given a tour of their large warehouse filled with hardware, where we learnt how they organised all their products and how it was exported to every customer. We were also shown all their services, such as personally customised packaging and personalised software instalments and updates. We learnt how Computacenter found the best way to reduce pollution due to electronic devices by reusing them instead of recycling them. After this insightful tour, we were put into workshops. The first one we did was driving a robot. We saw first hand how difficult it was to control the robot to make sure it would not crash, but those of us who were gamers found it much easier! The second workshop we moved onto was a face scanning machine, which scans your face and tells you what Hogwarts House you’re in. We had a look at the coding and how it worked, and we were given advice on where to get bits of code so we could create our own program. The final workshop of the day was about OBS, a streaming platform. We had a chance to perform our own little show/podcast while also being able to see all the work that goes into streaming from behind the scenes. We were then given a lunch break before we began our quick networking program. Volunteers from the Computacenter came in to talk to us about their work, how they got to their position and we were allowed to ask questions throughout the five minutes we had with each volunteer.
After a full day at Computacenter, our two industrial cadet teams had learnt a lot about STEM, from the technical point of it and the behind-the-scenes work of how to get into STEM. The girls also learnt about apprenticeships and possible work experience at Computacenter, which many thought of as they will have have to find some work experience next year. Computacenter has given our two industrial cadet teams an insight into the field of STEM and what it’s like to step into the real world. Thank you Computacenter for such an educational and wonderful experience!
Prudence C
