Earth Sciences

Congratulations to Earth Sciences Team Greenough which made it through to the semi-finals of the BP Ultimate Field Trip competition.

Team Greenough: Rhys Shea, Lok-Hin Lee and James Bills

The BP Ultimate Field Trip is an annual competition between UK universities which has gone global with this year. Teams are faced with real life challenges and are pitted against high calibre science & engineering students to win the ultimate prize. This year the task is to devise a technical innovation which is able to reduce the cost of Passenger Kilometres Travelled (PKT) by 2030. Engineers certainly felt at home with this, and took Earth Scientists like ourselves out of our comfort zone.

The Journey:

Firstly we had to take an online test consisting of engineering questions which could not easily be researched online and required the whole team to complete. The following stages were each more challenging than the last and required increased amounts of research with the second stage consisting of a power point presentation outlining our solution. In order to tackle this reduction in travel our idea involved the use of magnetic induction to wirelessly power electric cars as they travel along roads. This would be incorporated to specific motorways initially, which we heavily researched as well as the implications of this proposal. Our next step was to produce a professional poster which would be presented by our team at BP’s London offices. Over two days we had to convince judges of our idea in 6 short presentations and a final large presentation with Q & A for 30 minutes to a board of specialists from BP.

We met many interesting people from numerous universities, as well as BP, and had the opportunity to experience the working environment in one of the most renowned companies of our field. From the many teams that entered we were whittled down to 12 at the semi-finals only to miss out on the finals by 4 teams from Oxford, Strathclyde, Glasgow and Imperial. Although this is unfortunate, we have had a great experience and are delighted to have represented UCL having managed to beat many teams including 3 from Cambridge, 5 from Oxford and 12 from Imperial. Through this experience we have learnt a lot more about ourselves, honed our team work and presentation skills, as well as many others. We have also been rewarded with a short experience with BP, a cash prize and will be attending the finals where we get the opportunity to meet the host – Dara O’Briain.