Reflections of our Industrial Cadets

Kayuki's Reflection

One of my main reasons for wanting to apply to Industrial Cadets was the experience it provided, and the fact that I would like to study engineering in the future. Industrial Cadets is an easy way to immerse yourself into the world of engineering and the demands of being on a project, while still a student. In our group, we got to come up with a project that we wanted to design and create, something that would stretch us but still be interesting. Our mentor from Airbus has real-world engineering experience and provides expert assistance to our group any time we encounter a problem in our project. Together, after hours of research, we decided to design a rover for the moon Europa, a task that you would think requires years of engineering knowledge and experience but, being able to work in a group, and with an industry mentor makes the daunting task seem more manageable. The group aspect of Industrial Cadets is the most important as it is a way of mimicking the conditions of the real world. Projects will always have different people in them, each with different ideas and solutions to problems. Each member is a valuable part of the team and has a different role: project manager, researcher, designer, and more. We received seminars on how to operate in a team and how to figure out which role we’d fall into, every seminar we sat in was valuable and interesting, providing information and help, not only for Cadets but for the real world too.

The task of building the rover felt scary and unachievable to all of us, but with the help of our mentor, the steps we had to follow became clearer and more manageable. To be able to put the rover together we had two workshop days where we stayed overnight in London so we could use the UCL engineering facilities. During these workshop days, the members of our group fell into their different positions and jobs, separating into the coding and electrical group and the mechanical group. During these two days, we worked together to build the rover and combine the work we had been doing leading up to these days, like putting all our 3D printed parts together, using different machines and tools available in the workshop. These two workshop days were the most valuable to me as, not only did we make a massive amount of progress in our project, but we also got to spend more time together as a team and meet different people from other schools, learning about their Industrial Cadets projects.

Overall I have gained a lot of experience from the Industrial Cadets, in different areas and under different circumstances, I am now clearer on the path I want to take in the future, what university, what course, and what job, and now know how to use different pieces of equipment and machinery and of course, how to build a functional Europa Rover.

Written by: Kayuki Sen (Team 1)

Kylan's Reflection

On the 10^th of January, the Industrial Cadets Gold team embarked on a trip to UCL to build a product that we had designed over the last couple of months. I am currently studying Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Drama. When I first heard about Industrial Cadets, I was immediately interested and captivated by this fantastic opportunity to showcase my skills to design and build a product that would be used by Leonardo (An Italian multinational company specialising in aerospace, defense, and security). This project helped me hone my teamwork skills and allowed me to listen carefully to other people’s ideas to design a model for our product. As a Project manager, I had to make sure we were all running on schedule and sticking to our budget. Our project was to design a box that protects an object inside it. The box that we created had motion sensors and a motor that sprayed liquid when someone came close. We also used a Raspberry Pi computer to code the motion sensors. Whilst making this product, I learned many skills such as learning how to use Excel spreadsheets, learning how to use sophisticated machinery, as well as creating timelines about our progress. I found going to UCL an extremely useful insight into what it would be like to study mechanical engineering, as we were able to see the projects that university students had created: sports cars powered on Hydrogen (which only weighed 38 kg!) and rockets.

Written by: Kylan Athithan (Team 2)