SKILLS & TRAINING MAY 2019
THE EXPERIMENTER
Professor Helen Rogers
associate professor
To ensure NMiTE is a success from the
o , Professor Rogers is in charge of the
Design Cohort, a sample group of young
people who are helping to co-create
the university...
The Design Cohort is a group of 25
young people who joined in September
last year and are helping to co-create the
university. They aren’t students, but they are
of a typical demographic. We’ve been able to test out some of
our ideas and use them to work out what some of our learning
spaces might look like.
We decided to adopt this method based on the experience
of Olin College of Engineering in the US. They had been due to
open their doors, but quickly realised as the time approached
that they were nowhere near ready. Instead, they decided to
have a ‘pioneer group’, who would come and work with the
academic team to help design, fi nalise and build their academic
programme. We’ve worked very closely with Olin, and they
stressed the importance of having one of these groups. Planning
was vital, they told us. We only had a two-week window to fi ll
the Design Cohort, which made for a very interesting process.
We opened it to anyone who was looking to take a gap year
or anyone who had recently graduated – in any subject. All we
were looking for were people with the characteristics that we
wanted to see in our students: passion, curiosity and resilience.
We received around 50 applicants. They were asked to fi ll out
three questions, each in no more than 200 words, which would
demonstrate their creativity. The fi rst question was ‘what does
engineering mean to you?’ Remember, some of these people
hadn’t done science or maths since GCSE and now had a degree
in philosophy. We also asked them to ‘sell’ NMiTE. The third thing
involved them working in teams and pick out their strengths and
weaknesses. Finally, we asked them to make a video to explain
how they would co-create NMiTE.
We did ask for a CV and a covering letter, but I can honestly
say that I didn’t look at A-Level or GCSE results. After a rigorous
induction day, where we gave the applicants a series of handson
tasks to complete, we were left with our fi nal 25. They are all
eager to learn and have a passion for education.
It’s been a very eye-opening exercise for us: a lot of the
things we thought would be a no-brainer for young people,
they’ve said ‘no’ to. We’ve had to refl ect what they want from
their learning experience, even down to how we communicate
with them. Emails don’t get read as often as a text message,
for example. Social media isn’t necessarily the best place to
advertise a course because they don’t take it seriously. The
Design Cohort has been incredibly valuable to ensuring that
when we open, we’ll be getting it right.
THE BUSINESS OWNER
Toby Kinnaird
CEO, Barrs Court Engineering & engineer in residence at NMiTE
Toby acts as NMiTE’s engineer in residence, liaising with
local businesses to promote the work the university is doing.
He also runs a local precision engineering fi rm...
As a business owner, I have struggling to recruit talent that
was able to cope with the changing pace of technology. It’s
particularly hard in Hereford – I could get people in from all
over the country for a three-month secondment, but trying to
encourage them to stay was hard. Hereford isn’t a university
town, so there’s not a lot for young people to do. The reason
for developing a university in Hereford was fi rst and foremost
about regenerating the area.
For the past 12 months, I’ve been talking to di erent
companies, employers and community partnerships about what
they need and whether they share the same visions as NMiTE.
They said they needed a work-ready graduate who was able to
take on the work you do in industry today. Over the past year,
we’ve had conversations with about 150 career
partners about the aims of NMiTE. We’re
industry-led, so we want employers to
have an infl uence on the curriculum.
They can provide expertise and
challenges, or mentor students in their
professional development. They can also
provide equipment and machinery.
The other side to partnerships is the
community angle. We want to avoid the ‘town
and gown’ disparity that a icts some university towns,
and embed NMiTE into Hereford. We have a community strategy:
fi rstly, engagement with the city of Hereford and the wider county,
with satellite sites in various other towns. Secondly, to utilise
existing provision, such as the city’s library, both as a facility for us
to use but also for us to enhance it for the people of Hereford. The
same goes for sports facilities – we’d rather embed ourselves in
existing gyms, swimming pools and sports clubs to allow them to
grow, instead of setting up our own and competing against them.
Another way of getting involved in the community is via
community challenges. As part of the curriculum, students will
undertake a three-month project on a community element such
as a charity, school or something like the local utility company
to reduce waste water from an educational perspective, not just
in terms of fi xing leaks. We also have an outreach programme via
our Ingenuity Studio, which is a shipping container that travels
around local schools to promote STEM to young children.
The type of student that we want means we have to be
attractive to people who hadn’t considered engineering before.
NMiTE can make good engineers out of people who have done
philosophy, English and geography at A-Level. As long as they’ve
got the drive to want to do it, the technical aspect of engineering
can be taught.
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