Thinking About the Future

I spent today in three long meetings - nothing surprising about that, other than each was really quite interesting.

First up was the Engineering PEG (the Project Executive Group with over site of our large building programme).  We received reports on there strands of activity:

1. The Engineering Graduate School (EGS).  Tenders have been received and a contractor will be appointed in a day or two. Despite the inevitable asbestos hiccup the programme is back on track, and we can still hope to occupy in September 2013
2. The New Engineering Building (NEB) at Jessop's East.  This is the new teaching building that will provide state of the art specialist engineering facilities, more student led learning facilities of the kind found in the Information Commons and new staff-led facilities.  All at a scale to support our projected student numbers up to 2021.
3. Mappin refurbishment.  Even with the construction of the EGS and NEB far too much of our estate will be of poor quality.  Accordingly, a programme has been running for the last few months to review and plan for a very substantial refurbishment campaign.

Second meeting of the day was a review of the submissions for collaborative research space.  Three floors of the EGS will be given over to large interdisciplinary research groups, and following a call for expressions of interest, a Faculty panel met today to consider the submitted cases.  We were over-subscribed  but have been able to identify soon-to-be-refurbished space to create some extra opportunities.  Selected groups will be working to refine their proposals over the coming weeks.

And finally the Faculty's Strategy Review Steering Group met today for the first time to reflect on the process we will adopt in reviewing our current strategy.  The groups comprised a cross-section of staff selected in the hope that they would have opinions to offer - hopes were met!  More will be heard from them over the next few months.

A day full of meetings is not for everyone; but when the meetings uniformly convey optimism and ambition for the future they seem bearable.

Being a bit global

I've been meaning to write something about an event that took place in the Faculty 2 weeks ago: the Global Engineering Challenge (GEC) but stuff kept getting in the way.

I spent most of last week in Ireland as part of a review of Engineering at NUI Galway.  On the way there I joined the Vice Chancellor and other colleagues at Westminster (so not really on the way there at all) for a dinner with most of our local MPs.  We were there as guests of Paul Blomfield, MP for Sheffield Central and former General Manager at the Student's Union.  Our purpose was to seek their support in our plan to develop a New Engineering Building on the Jessop's East site.  It very quickly became apparent that we didn't need to explain why Engineering growth would be good for the Region - they explained it to us, and the compelling logic of maximising the benefit we can deliver from this very precious resource: a large, reasonably level site close to our existing facilities. We left even more convinced that this is the right thing to do for the City building on its and our global reputation for manufacturing and engineering.

The review in Galway was stimulating at a number of levels. First the Irish are great hosts and good company; it really is true that Guinness brewed in Ireland is drinkable, even enjoyable.  Second it was sobering to see the impact that government cuts are having on Universities there.  Finally the beneficial years of the Celtic Tiger period are very visible in Irish universities.  Their facilities are comparable or better than our own and their period of growth has left them equipped to compete globally.

Which brings me, at last, to the GEC.  About three years ago the Faculty made a commitment to giving our students the opportunity to work in multidisciplinary teams.  While all our students do a significant amount of project work in teams it's almost always in teams of one discipline, so 5 mechanical engineers or 5 computer scientists, working on a problem largely in their own discipline domain.  This led to a lot of pondering: how do you get 900 students (the rough number in a single year) organised into groups across all 9 disciplines.  While we were pondering we saw the phenomenon of Engineers Without Borders - a student society with global reach.  From that came the idea of taking part in their GEC.  I won't tell you what this means, but with some trepidation point you to www.shef.ac.uk/mediacentre/2012/engineering-without-borders-.html.  The enthusiasm shown in the YouTube clip (produced by Journalism students by the way) was real - but don't take my word for it ask around.  Everyone you ask will tell you that the staff involved were fantastic - as were the (largely post grad) facilitators.  They are rightly basking in their glory at the moment, before settling down to planning how to do it all again next year, oh, and to run an even more demanding event for all 900 second years, too.