The day I went back to Uni


The day I went back to Uni



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Yesterday saw me return to University. But this time, rather than being a student frantically copying the notes off the board and listening intently to the lecturer, I was the person at the front, talking.

I had a captive audience of around 40 people - the question is how do you make the most of that?!

As part of the education work we do, we visit schools, colleges and universities up and down the country (despite the name 'OR in Schools', we actually do lots of work with students outside school age). As you are hopefully aware, we run workshops, provide speakers for inspiring careers talks and attend career fairs to show people how they can use maths in a future career and in the real world.

For those studying maths (or similar) at uni, they tend to find it very beneficial discovering another career path they could go into - something which is directly relevant to their degree but isn't a maths teacher or accountant! So yesterday I had the pleasure of highlighting The OR Society to Leicester University students - what we do, how we work and why they should get involved. 

The presentation lasted about 45 minutes and covered all the key information about O.R. and The OR Society. It started with a general overview of what O.R. is and case studies of where it is used. From supermarkets (Waitrose or Asda) to the Government (Home Office or Department for Transport) they all use O.R. techniques regularly so I picked up on some of the key examples that people can easily relate to.

Following on from that, I talked about who employs O.R. analysts and the work they do (they are seldom called Operational Researchers - usually the name is 'modelling analyst' or 'risk forecaster' or 'big data analyst' or something like that). Now as the (actual) lecture summed it up at the end - any big organisation that's successful will be using O.R. and optimisation. Whether that's someone they've directly hired as an employee and they use full time or if it's a consulting firm they outsource to and use once a year, every organisation to be successful has to use O.R. techniques. They might not call it that and might not know it, but they are indeed using Operational Research.

I finished up with an overview of what The OR Society does, how we can support them and
our annual careers fair happening on the 15th November in Birmingham and how you could walk away with a job at JLR or NATS. Maybe more importantly though, I explained how to sign up for our FREE student membership (if you're on a numerate degree course, this is a no brainer!). Whether you're a business and finance student, engineering student, or a logistics student, if you're studying a degree involving numbers, then sign up to our FREE student membership online. It's available to all ages (mature students included) as well as Eramus students (studying here for a year) and part-time students. We'll simply e-mail your lecturer to confirm you're an actual person and once they confirm, you'll have access to all our publications, journals and much much more. 



End note - If you're a lecturer (or careers advisor) for a business school or maths school and want us to talk to your students, get in touch. The session is free of charge, and we even give out free pens at the end!



Interested? Bored? Hopefully not the latter ….


Tweet us @ORinSchools or @TheORSociety or drop us an email: schools@theorsociety.com






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