Many congratulations to Alex Gentry (Year 11), who has achieved a Silver Industrial Cadet Certificate after completing the BAE Systems Virtual Work Experience course.

Cadets graduating at the Silver Level have to complete a minimum of 30 hours of defined activities. Alex reflected: “I took part in this over the summer after finding it online as it was based around Computer Science and software engineering, a topic I’m extremely interested in. The aim of the week was to create a project showing your engineering or management skills: either a software engineering project, where you had to expand upon a Rock Paper Scissors game, an aerospace engineering project where you have to come up with a solution to the issue of space junk, or a management project where you plan an event using ideas around suppliers and balancing cost and quality.

“I chose the software engineering project, and made a python project which used rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock (five item Rock Paper Scissors) to encourage millionaires to bet on the outcome of the game and donate all the proceeds to charity. We then had to give a presentation on our project using skills we had learnt in presentation sessions we had attended during the week to the group and compare our different solutions to the same problem.

“In addition to sessions on presentation skills and time to work on our project, BAE Systems also gave us talks on careers, with a focus on engineering, employability, and sessions with people in BAE Systems who talked to us about their jobs and how they got into the profession.  Overall, it was a very useful week, and I learnt a lot about going into engineering from people already there, as well as some skills I can use in the future both for careers and university.”

A fantastic achievement, well done, Alex!