NMITE (New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering), the pioneering engineering and technology higher education institution based in Hereford, and the closest to the Hay Festival, will be attending with its own mini studio hosted by a ‘Professor of the Day’ to engage and share their engineering stories with Festival visitors.
NMITE’s Hay Festival theme is "Engineering Encounters: Inspiring Innovation” and NMITE staff will be on hand to engage the public with the fascinating world of engineering, demystify what an engineering degree does, inspire creativity, and encourage potential students to consider engineering as a degree choice.
NMITE will be conducting a daily (multiple choice) poll with questions designed to get Hay Festival attendees thinking more about engineering's societal impact while also providing interesting feedback for NMITE academics. Questions include asking what policies might help improve the number of young people moving into technology driven careers and what subjects will be most import for engineers of the future. Other questions are directly related to engineering “wicked problems” and modules tackled at NMITE, for example, food resilience and recycling while answers to a question about reducing the environmental impacts of travel to events will be compared with NMITE students’ work as they tackled this exact challenge earlier this year.
Associate Professor Peter Metcalfe, a long-time attendee at the Hay Festival and NMITE's senior serving member of its academic team will be one of the Professors of the Day.
“It is great to have the Hay Festival's high-profile platform to showcase how engineers tackle global challenges and, we hope, to motivate new problem-solvers. We’re here to inspire some hands-on public interaction whilst also raising awareness of the diversity and impact of engineering.”
James Newby President and Chief Executive of NMITE added
“As a local higher education institution, NMITE academics and students are regular Hay Festival attendees, but this year is the first when we are really taking NMITE to the Festival. We’re delighted to share some of our Professors with Festival visitors. We are sure they will go away with a different vision of engineering while we will come back armed with feedback, poll findings and conversations all of which will influence our thinking at NMITE."
