Editor’s note: Today we are featuring a post by Caroline Clarke, the Head of the Ericsson Corporate Social Responsibility team at its Southampton office in the UK.
On Thursday November 26, Ericsson Southampton opened the doors of its Experience Center to 70 local students for our 2nd Open Industry day. The aim of these Open Industry events is to educate students about the role of engineering within the TV and Media industry and to generate enthusiasm for the subjects that lead students into the profession.
Preparation for the Open Industry events is managed by a group of Ericsson engineers and technical staff, some of whom are active STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) ambassadors in local schools. Working together, they construct carefully designed activity programs that enable students to walk through the entire media broadcast chain and witness some of the technological challenges facing the global TV industry and how different engineering projects address these. I spoke with Karen Woodford who manages the Open Industry events from a HR perspective and she said these events are a great opportunity for students to get hands on with our technology and see that Engineering isn’t all hard hats and overalls!
This latest Open Industry day began with an exciting introduction to Ericsson as well as a broader industry overview about how video reaches the home and consumer devices. The students then visited two outside broadcast trucks, provided by Southampton Solent University, Intelsat and SisLive, where they saw first-hand how an audio and video mix comes together to create a program ready for broadcast.
They then went on to visit the site’s satellite farm where the students learnt how to broadcast live content via the uplink using real-time satellite space. Other activities for the students included making an antenna out of an empty crisp tube that could transmit live TV, experiencing a working picture quality testing system, and (the most popular activity), streaming video of the Open Industry event live to their own mobile devices, being able to see themselves live on screen!
The students were also given the chance to take part in a careers talk with Ericsson engineers and Southampton Solent University undergraduates and lecturers. All the students were keen to discuss their future learning plans and career aspirations. Ericsson engineers were able to discuss their own personal journeys with the students and the university undergraduates and lecturers offered advice on the current courses available.
Feedback has been extremely positive from the events we have hosted already, and we look forward to welcoming more local students to our Experience Center to show them what we do here at Ericsson Southampton. To continue with our pioneering research and solution development, we are taking these active steps to attract bright young minds with strong potential that will carry Southampton’s reputation as a UK hub of tech innovation into the future.
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