Amongst the recent rainy summer days, a day as lovely as today has been can only mean one thing – a barbecue! For the second year the Dean of the EPS (Engineering & Physical Sciences) Faculty, Martin Schröder, has organised a summer barbecue for staff to “say thank you for all [their] hard work”.  With over 650 staff members expected to attend, lots of planning was required, and so the weather couldn’t be anticipated. Back up plans had to be made to move the party inside if things got too downcast, but thankfully those plans weren’t needed. The weather was on our side!

We had some wonderful food and drink, including some none-traditional barbecue food such as pulled pork, and salted caramel & peanut butter ice cream… not on the same plate of course!

Along with the interesting food, there was also some great entertainment over the course of the event that showcased some of the university’s work. EEE (Electrical and Electronic Engineering) were busy racing their model cars, while Computer Science’s voice activated robots had a dance off, showed off their athletic skills with some pressups, and even fell over a few times – the surface out on the Pariser Lawn is a bit uneven, but it’s no trouble for the robots, who can easily stand themselves back up and get back to their dance moves.

All in all a lovely way to spend lunch time, and a lovely sentiment from the faculty’s Dean. We’re looking forward to next year!

Over two years ago I blogged about the apprenticeship scheme’s very first team building trip. In some ways it seems like a lifetime ago, and yet I find it hard to believe that I’m now halfway through my third year of working for the university.

A couple of months ago, members of all three cohorts of attended our third annual team building trip, filled with countless similarities and differences to the previous trips.

The first difference was the location… this time around rather than heading for the Lake District, we hopped on a coach that was bound for the Welsh coast.

Okay,  that might be stretching the truth as we never actually quite made it to the beach. Blue Peris, the activity centre in Snowdonia we were really headed for, do offer some coastal activities nearby in Anglesey that sound amazing, but the lovely spring weather didn’t agree with us on that front. Fortunately, the weather didn’t stop us having a fantastic time, and meant that enthusiastically throwing buckets of water into each other’s canoes on our last day wasn’t quite as frowned upon as it might have been if we’d ever had a hope of staying dry.

The second big difference was the fact that some of the apprentices had been on one or two previous team building trips. Every time I attend a team building event I come away from it feeling accomplished, and feel I’ve gained new skills that, but there are definitely key themes that stay with you and become much easier to adjust to each time. For the new apprentices, some of the ‘trust exercises’ may have felt uncomfortable at first, especially as there were members of the first and second cohorts of apprentices they’d not had many chances to speak to previously. I definitely remember feeling awkward during the first day of the 2014 team building, but by now it’s second nature to jump in and get involved, either taking the lead in an activity or identifying someone in your team who has the skills needed to take the lead instead.

The similarities came in the form of the actual activities we took part in. There were definitely some new experiences, for example traversing along the side of a gorge rather than actually walking along the river bed was an interesting twist on gorge walking, but there were lots of similar activities such as abseiling, canoeing, raft building, and rock climbing. We even climbed another mountain!

Although the view from the top of Yr Aran was obstructed by the huge grey rain clouds, which made it slightly less picturesque than last year’s climb up Helvellyn in the Lake District, reaching the top still gave everyone a great sense of achievement.

Each of the activities we took part in earned us a piece of a map and some coordinates and along with night walks around the quarries, a lovely meal at a local pub, and a surprisingly competitive game of pictionary, our evening activities involved using the ‘clues’ we were given each night, and figuring out how they came together to give us the mystery location of our final activity, the previously mentioned (and brilliantly fun) canoeing “debacle”, which turned into an impressive battle of water buckets!