Clubbing Together - Young Engineers Club

By attending a Young Engineers club, you get hands-on design experience of working on live projects and get to grips with problem solving, you learn project management skills and develop self confidence and esteem. It gives you the opportunity to enter exciting competitions with your club friends, like the annual Royal Navy challenge, which involves building specialist remote controlled vessels to carry out special missions; or, the BAA challenge, which asks you to design a park and ride system for airliners; or, the Airbus challenge, in which you have to fly an egg as far as you can in your own model aircraft and then land it intact.

Don’t be surprised if your new found confidence brings your innermost sense of inventiveness out into the open either, because as a previously unknown inventor, you could just discover hidden talents that could win you the title of Young Engineer for Britain. Many club members enter this annual contest, in which all manner of gizmos and gadgets are put forward by would be inventors and engineers. It is all about creativity and innovation and the clubs bring out the best in you. It even gives you the chance to travel as well as to win brilliant prizes including money!

If you are not competitive, don’t worry because you still get to spend time on team projects that might include for example helping local councils for the good of the community, like designing new apparatus for playgrounds. In some clubs there is the opportunity to work on real life engineering problems set by actual engineering companies, who invite you on site visits where you can see first hand what modern engineering is all about and what it’s like to work for an engineering company.

Although many Young Engineers clubs in the network are run by Physics or Design Technology teachers, some are run by the students themselves. In these cases, teachers give the responsibility of selecting projects and organising club sessions to the members themselves and just need to provide ‘project sign-off’. So, if your teachers are too busy to commit huge amounts of time but you’re keen to have a club, this could be an option. Quite a few other clubs are run by parents at home, or, as part of Scout or Youth Groups.

Remember, while providing you with great CV and interview material, you can also count your club involvement in the skill section of a Duke of Edinburgh award!

Check out www.youngeng.org if you’d like to find out more about the Young Engineers Club Network.