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Real Lives
Alex Cubitt
Engineering Leadership Awards
University & Course:
Durham University – Civil Engineering
Alex Cubitt graduated from
Durham University last year in civil engineering and
is now working with management consultancy Bain &
Co., researching companies. He says winning a
Leadership Award helped him to develop his
engineering knowledge in a way he could never have
done otherwise, thanks both to the £7,500 bursary
and backing and advice from entrepreneurs involved
in the programme. Last summer Alex and another
awardee, Marc Lien, arranged a study visit to
engineering companies in the USA and Mexico,
including Harley Davidson, Lockheed Martin, IBM and
Linear Tech. “We spoke to senior managers about
product development and motivation, we could never
have got that kind of access without backing from
The Academy,” he says, “and we came back with a pile
of company T-shirts!” He also stayed on to take a
month-long Spanish course.
The Leadership Award bursary
also enabled Alex to attend a Java script course to
help him with his final year project, developing a
standard way to represent geotechnical engineering
structures like foundations and retaining walls on
the internet. It also paid his fare to Hong Kong in
1999 to take up vacation work experience with his
degree sponsor, Ove Arup. “That was so interesting,”
he says, “they’re focused on massive infrastructure
projects – everything is ten times bigger than it is
here!”
Alex plans to get more
experience of the business and financial sector in
his management consultancy role for the next few
years and then take an MBA, after which he hopes to
go back into engineering at a more managerial level.
“The Leadership Award has helped to make me more
confident,” he says. “The selection process itself
is very rigorous and helps later with job interviews
and the annual training and development event was
great for presentation skills and developing
long-term skills and career plans.”
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