Frank Gallagher

Why did you choose Cranfield?

My undergraduate degree is in automotive and motorsport engineering, so I'm essentially changing fields regarding my work field. I heard from a lot of people in industry that the Cranfield courses are very good if you want to try and change, or broaden your scope, or work in a different field. I did an internship at Airbus and while I was there a lot of people who I worked with had studied at Cranfield and recommended it since they knew that I was going to study a master's.

What do you most enjoy about your course?

The part of the course that I'm finding most interesting at the moment is the group project, which is in some cases is teamed with a company.

The one that I'm working on is with Airbus Defence and Space, so you get weekly “drumbeat” meetings where the professor who's running the project will remind you of the requirements and everyone has their own work package that they need to work on. It's really good because it's perfectly representative of how things would run in a real company. It prepares people who might not have had an internship experience for what work might be like once they finish University.

Why did you choose this course and how are you funding your master’s?

I decided to take the course here to change the direction of my prospective career, and I'm funding that through student finance England.

Do you find your cohort is diverse and is this helpful?

I found the people are culturally very diverse on the course. I think it's really good, because in a real work environment, if you're working for a global company, you're going to be working with different nationalities. So I think it’s good that when you're studying it's the same - you can learn about how different countries do different things, and it all comes together and I think it works quite well.

Library

I think the library service is really helpful, I was actually really surprised as to how many databases Cranfield has access to, that really impressed me. My previous University had access to some databases, but not nearly as many as Cranfield does, and I was really impressed to see that I had access to all these different libraries and international databases.

Cranfield's Career Service and Career Fair

What did you like about the careers fair?

I like that the people here, to represent each company, in some cases were a Cranfield alumni. I liked seeing how people who may have been in my shoes, the year before, have got to where they are now and also getting their honest opinion about how they feel about working for these companies. Obviously looking at a company from the outside it can look very flash and glamorous but, finding out how it actually functions from an interior perspective is obviously very important

Have your career goals altered as a result of coming to the fair?

I don't think that my career goals will have changed, but I'll definitely consider more graduate opportunities. I feel like my scope has been broadened a little bit by the experience, and I might consider graduate opportunities in a slightly different field to what I've currently been looking at.

Did you use the careers service to prepare for today?

I used the careers service to make my CV a bit better, I followed their guidelines, on how to write a CV and I think it's made my CV look a lot more presentable and professional to perhaps how it was beforehand.

How else did you prepare for today?

To prepare for today I wrote up a list of companies that I already knew about that I wanted to look at and ones that I didn't know too much about, but I did want to see if they had any graduate opportunities that I might find interesting.

What advice would you give to students preparing for careers fair?

I'd say to prepare for the careers fair, to have a look online at the websites of the companies that you know are going to be there. Have a look at which graduate opportunities you think you might be interested in and then prepare a list of questions to ask about graduate opportunities you need bit more information on. I think it all went according to plan, there was nothing really that stood out as a mistake or anything that I could have changed.