MAY 2019 SKILLS & TRAINING
THE EDUCATOR THE FUNDRAISER
Harriet Dearden
head of philanthropic engagement
Harriet is in charge of fundraising for the new university.
Her job is to lobby businesses and government to help
support the project...
NMiTE is built on philanthropy, and always has been. We started
with some initial seed funding of £1.2m, which was raised
from predominately local businesses and individuals in chunks
of £5,000. Amongst those companies were some very large
household names – Heineken, Balfour Beatty and Welsh Water
were some of our initial investors, for example. Without that
initial leap of faith, NMiTE wouldn’t exist at all.
We say that our USP is that we bring ‘disruptive innovation
to higher education’. A lot of businesses are saying that they
are struggling to attract graduates that are ready to hit the
ground as engineers, so are looking to invest with us to do
something di erent and develop a project that is innovative
and transformative – not just in engineering, but in all higher
education. Not only is our curriculum unique, but we’re also
looking to widen access and breaking down
barriers, particularly for women. There are
so many hooks for companies to invest
in, which for a fundraiser is a great
position to be in!
We’ve been able to build NMiTE
from the ground up, to do whatever
we want it to do without hundreds
of years of institutional baggage – we
can take whatever route we want and not
have to worry about adhering to tradition or
protocol. Potential funders are very excited about that as well.
I’ve been in fundraising my entire career, and have worked
with academic institutions with long histories that have a tradition
of fundraising. In those cases, benefactors know what their
gifts will go towards. With NMiTE, it’s been a bit more of a risk –
there was no guarantee we’d even get to this point. Now we’re
getting to the point where we’re looking to develop longer-term
partnerships with supporters to fi nd things that are interesting
and get them engaged and invested in what we’re doing.
What companies get for their investment depends on the
company. We’ve developed a whole range of options for them,
ranging from mentoring our students, to helping deliver the
curriculum sprints, where businesses come in and o er up
problems to be solved. For them, the return is that they get
to work fi rst-hand with what we hope will be some of the
brightest and best future engineers. As a recruitment tool, that’s
invaluable. Our students will do a work placement during their
course, and if the company likes the student they have, there’s
the chance to turn it into a graduate job opportunity. NMiTE is
the chance for companies to be part of something genuinely
ground-breaking.
Professor Martin Gillie
provost & chief academic o cer
Professor Gillie joined NMiTE in
February this year. His role is to
develop the curriculum for the new
university, and distinguish it from
the traditional teaching models...
We want the degree to be as close to ‘real’
employment as possible, while still recognising
that it’s an education. We are looking to engage deeply with
industry – many universities have industrial advisory boards that
meet a few times a year but have minimal input on the teaching.
What we’re trying to achieve at NMiTE is to have industrial partners
involved with all the teaching we do, mainly via project-based
learning in a variety of subjects. Rather than sitting in a massive
lecture theatre taking notes, we want to get groups sat around a
table in groups of fi ve or six looking at ways to solve real-world
problems. Lectures as a model of teaching are not particularly
great. The occasional one can be stimulating and interesting, but
four or fi ve a day and the information just doesn’t stick. It’s also
well known that social ‘learning by doing’ brings results.
Another novel approach is that we are taking a broader
approach to engineering than many other universities, which
see it primarily as a science, with lots of maths, physics and
complicated equations. We see it more as an art, with creative
thinking, imagination and problem-solving coming to the fore.
As a consequence, we won’t be asking our students to have
a ‘traditional’ maths or science A-Level when they enrol. No
question, it’s a crucial part of being an engineer, and we teach it as
the course progresses, but it means we’re already fi shing from a far
wider pool of students at A-Level, particularly female students who
often don’t choose to take maths or physics at the age of 15, but in
every other respect tick every box for being a successful engineer.
We have what we call the Compressed Programme: a normal
MEng degree takes four years, with three terms per year, a big gap
in the summer and quite a lot of time o at Christmas and Easter.
We’re going to run it much more continuously, over 46 weeks a
year, which means students get a full MEng degree in just three
years, which we think will suit a lot of people, especially those
changing careers who don’t want to spend a long time studying.
Plus, of course, there’s a cost-saving element as well.
A three-year MEng degree is very unusual. It won’t be for
everyone – there will always be people who just need a big break
in the summer – but because we’re teaching in modular blocks,
we don’t have to think in calendar years: if you want to stop and
take three months o you can do. If you put all that together we’re
pretty unique. Most of the ideas have been trialled successfully
elsewhere in isolation, but we’re the fi rst to put them all together.
Whether three years or four, over the course of the MEng,
students will do 21 individual projects, eight toolkits, two
community projects and a 22.5-week industry placement.
www.manufacturingmanagement.co.uk 35
/www.manufacturingmanagement.co.uk