Work experience Blog: Fred

Category: Blog Posts
Date: Monday 24 June 2019

Hi everyone,

My name is Fred and I currently attend Beckfoot School. This year, we were offered the chance to go out on work experience at a place of our choice just before we break up for the summer holidays. Luckily, I was accepted by the Leeds university sustainability team. For the next week I will get to understand what they do in order to make sure the university is as sustainable as possible.

On my first day here, the first thing I got the chance to see was the bike hub set up all around the university campus. I learned that while here, it is cheap and easy to hire out or lock up bikes within the vicinity of your work place. Also, if you have any problems and need help fixing your bike, then there is a workshop in the afternoon three times per week where Romain, a member of the sustainability team, will be able to talk you through the procedure of how to replace or repair parts of your bike or fix it for you. I got the chance to help out with repairing some of these bikes and really enjoyed learning how to do it. I now know how to replace a tyre, check for a puncture, and repair faulty breaks.

On my second day, I went to a conference lead by Yorkshire Water. At this conference I got to learn bits about the six capitals (financial, natural, manufacturing, social and relationship, human and intellectual) and how businesses, like Yorkshire Water, have to decide how to implement these into the way that they run their business. I found this experience very interesting because I had the chance to see what happened at these kinds of events and meet some of the people who attend them. I also had the chance to research the kind of activities that went on due to the work put into the living lab.

On day 3 of my work experience, I had the chance to look through the SDG’s that the sustainability team have to think about when they are planning any projects. The SDG’s are basically goals that the university has to try and meet set up by the UN. The sustainability team will then provide evidence of where they have reached each of these goals which are expected of them. I had to set up the template for them to then input all of the evidence that they had acquired over the year where it will then be ranked against all of the other universities that have signed up to this.

Later on, I got to go and look around the garden to see what had been planted by the students, I also got to hear about what was planned to happen with the garden later on in the year. I enjoyed this because I got to see what some of the university students did in their free time.

On my fourth day of work experience, I began the day by talking to some of the sustainability team about what they had done in their careers so far. I found out about some of the courses they had taken at university and what jobs they had done prior to joining the sustainability team. I found this very useful because it gave me an idea of some of the opportunities I will have when I go into work. I also got some tips from them about what to look for in a job and what to think about when I am picking a course to do at university.

I also had the chance to learn about the student sustainability conference from last year, which had been put on by the sustainability team in order for them to learn about the sustainability of the world or show off any presentations about research they had done recently. They also get to listen to a talk by someone famous on sustainability. My job was to think of any ways I thought that they could improve this conference or anything that I thought they could add to it.

On my final day here with the sustainability team, I joined some of them while they had an introduction to the “team” app this morning. I really enjoyed this as it was a lot of fun trying out all of the different things you could do on it and gave me a chance to see what kind of things the people working at the university use.

In the afternoon I had to answer some questions on what a new university student starting here would want to know about and look for before they start here. There were also some questions on what the student would want to know about sustainability before joining. This was interesting for me because it made me think about what I would want to know about a university before choosing it.

Overall, I have really enjoyed my time here with the sustainability team and would like to thank them for the experiences I have had here with them and how they have helped me along with all of the tasks I have done here, especially Kelly Forster for organising all of this for me and letting me come along.

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