The document discusses the placement opportunities within the MSc in Modern Building Design, emphasizing the importance of both technical and communication skills for students. It highlights the preparation process for placements, including early engagement with industrial providers and the significance of a two-way interview process. Successful placements can lead to job offers and industry-relevant dissertations, ultimately enhancing students' career prospects.
The document discusses the placement opportunities within the MSc in Modern Building Design, emphasizing the importance of both technical and communication skills for students. It highlights the preparation process for placements, including early engagement with industrial providers and the significance of a two-way interview process. Successful placements can lead to job offers and industry-relevant dissertations, ultimately enhancing students' career prospects.
The document discusses the placement opportunities within the MSc in Modern Building Design, emphasizing the importance of both technical and communication skills for students. It highlights the preparation process for placements, including early engagement with industrial providers and the significance of a two-way interview process. Successful placements can lead to job offers and industry-relevant dissertations, ultimately enhancing students' career prospects.
The document discusses the placement opportunities within the MSc in Modern Building Design, emphasizing the importance of both technical and communication skills for students. It highlights the preparation process for placements, including early engagement with industrial providers and the significance of a two-way interview process. Successful placements can lead to job offers and industry-relevant dissertations, ultimately enhancing students' career prospects.
Video Transcript Week 3 Step No. 3.13 Session Title Placement opportunities Presenter Dr Steve Lo
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome to this short introduction to the placement opportunities that we have as
part of the MSc in Modern Building Design. Before I go into the details of the placement, it may be worth talking about some of the challenging environments that we place our students in. If we look at the modern building design process, there are many different stages and steps along that process, which bring in lots of people from many different disciplines and they have to actually engage with all these people.
So for instance, if they want to produce a low-carbon building, they have to be fully aware of all the details of building physics, thermal performance, daylight and shading, and natural ventilation. And then from 2016 onwards, they will have to be conversing with all aspects of building information modelling. Then there's the dreaded rules and regulations and certification. These have to be fully adopted throughout the design process, and they could affect all the outcomes and some of their design solutions.
If they do present a final design solution, that will constantly be changing throughout the design process. If they have to present to clients, for instance, they will have to maybe run simulations, do dynamic simulations, and present some of the performance figures for this building. Now, all these technical skills have to be combined with some of the softer communication skills. They have to be able to communicate with design teams, and ultimately actually present and defend their proposed solutions to real, real clients.
Now, if you look at traditional placements, there's a period of acclimatisation where
sometimes the students are just trying to find their way within the company, and the company's trying to establish what the core skills and competencies are, of the students and very often, not much useful work is done for at least a couple of weeks, maybe a month. All the technical hard skills they've learned during their MSc, sometimes they don't know when they should be applying these and in some cases, they don't know if they should be applying them.
So how do we prepare the students for placement? This starts long before they actually commence their real placement. Up to three months before the start of the placement, we invite our industrial placement providers to come in and talk to the students, and present their research ideas to the students, which they can pick and choose from and therefore, they start this engagement with the placement providers, and they develop a rapport with them long before the placement stars. And this matching of the students to the project allows them to actually have a fully- developed project, industrially relevant, just as soon as they start the placement, with real deliverables, lots of benefits that the company can actually use straight away.
Finally, students often forget that it's a two-way interview process. They should be able to interview the company, as well as the company using the placement as a probationary period, so that when they actually finish the placement, and go off and do a dissertation, they actually have an industry-driven dissertation with mutual benefits. If they prove to be invaluable to the company, then very often the company will offer them a position, and that will actually develop their career long after the end of their dissertation.
And this produces real results, real deliverables. We have a purge ventilation system developed for Arup by one of our placement students. We have a design process, which is more efficient than existing design processes for complex geometry glass- fibre reinforced concrete.
So just to sum up then, all the hard and soft skills are developed and embedded within the programme, long before the placement starts. And we mentioned the two- way interview process between the students and the companies. And as I said, if they make themselves invaluable, by and large they will be offered a position after their placements. This is incredibly important, especially in the current climate of rising tuition fees, and this demand - ever demand - for value for money. And we think that actually, this is a new model for placement in higher education. And we think that our programme will deliver this.
Anyway, that's a very short introduction to placement as part of the Modern Building Design programme. I hope you enjoyed this introduction. And we hope to see you again soon.
