Your stories

November 2021 — we were delighted to be informed that Sarah Mirkin (Year 2/3), one of the winners of our Imagine! STEAM online competitions earlier in the year, was recently invited to Downing Street for an audience with the Prime Minister ahead of his attendance at COP26.

There is more information here:

https://twitter.com/borisjohnson/status/1453708293671636997?s=21

She was also lucky enough to be interviewed for Sky News, along with other children:

https://schools.firstnews.co.uk/fn-education-tv/fyi/fyi-episode-146/#fvp_FYI-TX146_FIRST-NEWS

Our congratulations and thanks to Sarah and her mother, who very kindly told us that "initiatives such as yours ... help the children feel part of something important and feel heard contribute in many surprising ways".

Following a careers talk from CSES, Solomon Malih (Year 12/13) completed a successful Nuffield Research Placement over the 2021 summer holidays. He has kindly told us his story here...

Over the summer, I had the privilege of completing a Nuffield Research Placement. The Nuffield Research Placements are an excellent opportunity to spend two weeks with a subject specialist or industry expert working on a live research topic. As for what you do on this two-week placement, that can vary. I know one placement which was centred around artificial intelligence, whilst another was more practical and involved designing a solution to a real-world engineering problem. Some will be more research-based than others, but they will all likely involve reading academic literature, collecting primary and secondary data, and working with the software used in academia and industry.

I spent two weeks investigating the use of quantum computation for particle physics with a research fellow at the University of Cambridge. Some of the theory and mathematics involved was at an undergraduate or even post-graduate standard, but my supervisor was very patient with me and willing to explain things multiple times if needed. My supervisor's work involved testing a quantum physics concept known as a gauge theory using quantum computation. The particles involved in testing the gauge theory can be modelled as quantum gates, which I implemented in a quantum circuit and simulated using Qiskit, an open-source SDK (software development kit) that provides tools for working with quantum machines.

At the end of the placement, I had to produce a 10-20 page research report outlining my project's aim, findings, methodology, and more.

Read more: Solomon's Story: Nuffield Placement