Over the past week, I've been working in a team of 5 to provide recommendations to the Erb's Palsy Group, to help raise the awareness of Erb's Palsy.

Erb's Palsy is a nerve condition in the shoulder and arm that results in paralysis or loss of muscle function. It often occurs during childbirth, and can affect someone for the entirety of their life. Treatment from a very early age is vital for recovery. Raising awareness will help parents, schools and medical staff be more knowledgeable of the condition.

📚 For the project, I looked into the research literature surrounding Erb's Palsy to understand the current coverage and any gaps. I also identified a couple key issues brought up by the research, and provided recommendations on what the charity can do to improve future research.

My team and I produced a booklet of all our findings and recommendations, and presented our findings to the Erb's Palsy Group through a slide presentation.

🌟 I'm so grateful for the opportunity to have been able to get a taste of consultancy, develop my skills and get to work with the Erb's Palsy Group.

Thank you to Tom Spurway, AFHEA and Queen Mary Careers and Enterprise for leading the program and giving us your insights!

And finally, thank you to my teammates: Aeron Alano, Anika Soni, Donya Asady and Amro Raytab!!! 🌟

Over the 3 days of the program, I worked in a team with people from completely different backgrounds to develop and pitch our idea - a platform connecting micro-influencers to brands to allow greater transparency for both sides.

📝 First, we completed a lean canvas to precisely identify our customer segment and better understand the problem we had to solve.

📋 Next, we headed out into London to interview our customer segment and learn more about their experience. We had to pivot quickly, when feedback from our customer segment meant we had to change how our solution would work.

🎤 Finally, we had to develop our pitch and slide deck and present it to a panel of industry experts and the other teams. I'm proud of how much I was able to develop my public speaking in such a short amount of time!

⭐ I'd like to say a massive thank you to the Queen Mary Careers and Enterprise team and David Tomas-Merrills for organising such an incredible event, and a massive thank you to my team: Kyra Sinha, Ronald Almeida and Laura Felicíssimo!!! ⭐

I worked in a team of 6 other students to design a solution to improve the usability of IBM's SkillsBuild platform. With my team members all being from different degrees, we had a great range of creative ideas to build upon. Our final idea involved implementing 'job profiles' - a way for users to say their current skills and the job they're aiming for, so the SkillsBuild AI can make more personalised course suggestions.

Before we got started, we had a great talk from John McNamara about how to build a good idea with design thinking:

1️⃣💡 Empathy Mapping - we need to thoroughly understand the problem, otherwise we could invest in solutions that don't actually solve the problem! We can build empathy maps which have 4 fields: what users feel, say, think and do. This gets us into the mindset of the user so we can realise what the underlying problems actually are.

2️⃣💡 Ideation - once we properly understand the problem, we can start thinking of ideas. We can critique and 'chip away' at our initial ideas to make them stronger and more narrow, and more directly solve the problem.

3️⃣💡 Simplicity and Cost - we can select which idea to develop further by plotting the ideas on a graph of simplicity vs cost, with increasing simplicity along one axis, and decreasing cost along the other. We'll find the cheapest and simplest solution in the top right-hand corner.

I loved getting to meet students from other universities, and seeing the massive variety of robots designed to solve the same problem.

I also learnt so much about engineering, including:

🦾 Problem solving and adaptability - Each team encountered unexpected challenges, so we all had to think on our feet to make the best of our limited resources (and our extremely limited time!).

🦾 Teamwork - I couldn't be more grateful for my team! Everyone brought their strengths to the table, giving us the best chance in competing.

🦾 Resilience - Unexpected problems arose continuously, and not all of our solutions worked first time around. We had to push through and keep trying, while supporting each other in the process.

I'm really proud to share that my team secured 4th place out of the 13 teams, while another team from Queen Mary University of London took home 3rd place!