Year in Industry Placement students from the Faculty of Science and Engineering celebrated their success during the Faculty’s first Student Placement Awards.
The awards, which ran for the first time this year, recognise those students who have made a significant impact during their Year in Industry placement.
Students were invited to submit an application, with the endorsement of their employer or their academic supervisor. Five finalists made it through to the award ceremony, where the winners were decided by a panel chaired by Professor Liz Sheffield, APVC for Education for the Faculty of Science and Engineering. The judging panel also included a representative from KPMG (Emma Jenkins, Student Recruitment Officer), academic leads for employability (Valentina Tamma, Computer Science and James Gaynor, Chemistry), Iwan Williams (Faculty Employability Business Partner), Jennifer Callaghan (Faculty Placement Lead), and Mia Dacre (Student Careers Coach).
The five finalists gave a short presentation about their experience and the significant impact they made during their placement. The quality of the applications was outstanding, and they were scored very closely by the panel.
The KPMG ‘Best Female Student in Science and Tech’ was awarded to Eleanor Barlow, a MChem student who completed her placement at 3M, and developed a new formulation that is currently been patented.
The Faculty award for ‘Best Placement Student’ resulted in a tie, and was jointly awarded to Alvaro Lopez Hernandez (BSc in Software Development) and Charlotte Mears (BEng in Industrial Design). During his placement, Alvaro had worked as an IBM Cognos analyst, and was invited to join the prestigious IBM Wimbledon team that provided data analytics on tennis players and the 2019 Tournament to the press. Charlotte worked at Mondalez International, a global snack manufacturing company, and was responsible for producing a new packaging design (from concept to deployment) for 3D printed chocolates, a novel product launched in Australia.
Other notable finalists were Florence Picciuto (BSc Artificial Intelligence), who completed a placement at Nomura International and Daniel Saxton (BSc Chemistry), who followed a long term passion for the aviation industry and completed a placement at Nats, UK’s primary Air Navigation Service Provider.
Professor Sheffield said about the awards: “This evening’s best placement awards event went exceptionally well. All five presentations were outstanding. The event ran extremely smoothly and the panel’s scoring generated a very, very close run result where we really needed the three awards.”