Trainee of the Year Award
2005 IAESTE UK Trainee of the Year Award goes to Scotland
On November 21st Ingrid Orme became the 8th winner of the IAESTE UK Trainee of the Year Award for her presentation on her placement with an architecture firm in Curitiba, Brazil. Second place was awarded to Jane Kendall of Oxford University who undertook a placement in Kenya, and third to Kevin Quinn, a Physics student from Queens University Belfast who spent the summer of 2005 in Norway.
The final featured ten students from around the UK, each of whom gave a five-minute presentation on the benefits of their placement abroad to a panel of judges headed by Sir Brian Smith, former Vice Chancellor of Cardiff University. The judges were unanimous in their choice of Ingrid, an architecture student from the Edinburgh College of Art.
This is the second time a student from a Scottish institution has won the Award, interestingly each time for their assessment of work experience in Brazil. In her conclusion to her competition entry, an essay on How I Benefited from International training, Ingrid wrote:
My trip has also had a huge impact on my academic and career plans. I've always been interested in issues of poverty in developing countries and seeing some of these issues firsthand has increased my long -held desire to move into a related career field. related to these things. I've returned to college for my final year and have chosen to study in the 'Architecture and Urbanism' module, with the hope that next year I may complete an internship with the UN in their human settlements division. For this reason too, and I've chosen to write my dissertation on the role that architectural design can play in humanitarian relief - partly inspired by the favelas I saw in Brazil. Once I've qualified as an architect my long -term career plan is to use my design skills to work in an NGO or relief organisation to provide some kind of alleviation to help alleviate conditions brought on by abject poverty. Being abroad has confirmed for me that working long-term in another culture, though often difficult and sometimes lonely, is a very real possibility for me.