We had a fantastic collaborative society event recently so we wanted to tell you about it!
We love shouting about society successes, especially when societies link up for joint events. Recently Chemical Engineering Society, Watt Women in STEM, and the Mechanical Engineering Society teamed up for the Royal Academy of Engineering's 'This is Engineering Day'! The theme this year was ‘Be the Difference’, and our societies ran some great events around this theme. We'd love to see more society colabs in the future so we hope this event inspires you!
There were discussion panels with engineers from all over the world who talked about the how the engineering world is changing, plus how panelists' companies are making a positive impact on the environment. It was great to see Heriot-Watt alumna on the panels, showing that our students can go on to do great things, with representation from?Babcock International Group,?BP,?Procter & Gamble,?AESG.
Highlights!
One of the panel discussions was around how the engineering world is changing as a result of a pandemic. All the panelists highlighted how engineering is constantly changing, but that the pandemic has caused an acceleration in this process and lead to new challenges.
Online meetings also saved time that would have been spent travelling internationally, for example, Katherine Bruce (AESG) is based in Dubai and would usually travel to Abu Dhabi for meetings, however meetings have been held online, leading to lower cost and overall greater convenience.
The next topic of discussion was around diversity and inclusion in the workplace. It was great to see a panel of three women which included a Director at BP. An interesting strategy taken by AESG is that they do not take note of your name or where you come from to avoid unconscious bias during the application process.
During the Q&A session, the panelists' shared the most rewarding part of their job. David Cumming spoke about how watching people grow, thrive and succeed at P&G has been rewarding over the last 31 years.
Overall, it was a great industrial panel event and very informative to hear the views of panelists from different backgrounds and various industries. The societies were really happy with how the event went and are looking forward to organising more events like this in the future.
Run your own events!
If your society has run an event that you want to tell us about, or you just want to give us some feedback, check out our "Tell us everything" survey. We'd love your feedback!
If you want to collab with another society the societies teams is a great place to find people!
A special thanks to Chem Eng's Social Media Manager, Morolake Adefioye, for writing up a report on the event from which this article was adapted.
