New scholarships a boost for engineering

New scholarships a boost for engineering at University of Waikato

Three promising young engineers are to receive scholarships being offered for the first time at the University of Waikato by leading New Zealand engineering consultants Beca.

Peter Leijen, Sam Garrett and Kevin Weller and are the winners of the inaugural scholarships, worth $2,500 each.

Offered to high-achieving students in their third year of a Waikato Bachelor of Engineering degree, the scholarships are designed to help address the skills shortage in engineering.

“As one of the largest engineering companies in the country, encouraging the best and brightest engineering students is part of our business,” says Beca regional manager John Revington. “We have offices in Hamilton and Tauranga so working with the University of Waikato’s School of Engineering is really an obvious fit for us.”

Professor Janis Swan, Associate Dean of Engineering at Waikato, says working with potential employers such as Beca helps ensure the Waikato degree is relevant to industry. “By creating these scholarships, Beca recognises that Waikato University is producing high-quality engineering students,” she says. “We very much appreciate this initiative – student fees are an ever-important subject for students (and their parents and supporters).”

The scholarships were established through the University of Waikato Foundation (Te Pou Taunaki), an independent charitable trust founded to support and resource the University of Waikato.

The three scholarship winners come from Hawke’s Bay, Paeroa and Katikati.

Hawke’s Bay: Peter Leijen
Straight A student Peter Leijen says he’s pretty much got his university fees covered – thanks to scholarships like that from Beca.

“It’s a big investment going to university,” says the former Havelock North High School student who’s studying for a degree in electronic engineering. “I chose Waikato because of the scholarships available.”

The Waikato BE is accredited by the national engineering professional body IPENZ, and includes a substantial work placement element. Leijen’s first placement was back home in Hawke’s Bay, in the R&D department at Sirtrack, a company that builds GPS devices used for tracking wildlife. “They range from backpacks for wekas to devices that can be put on anything from snails to whales,” he says.

Leijen focused on product development and performance testing during the three-month summer placement, which involved a lot of computer programming. “Electronic engineering covers everything from hardware to quite complex programming, and you need both to be a good engineer,” he says.

A keen motorsports fan, Leijen has worked with the Wesmo engineering student team at Waikato designing and building a race car to compete in Formula SAE. He’s also set up his own electronic design company for automotive applications, and has already designed a battery charger for Prius cars.

Paeroa: Sam Garrett
Former Waihi College student Sam Garrett is studying biochemical engineering – a field he says that offers a good mix of subjects. “I’m interested in engineering, maths, biochemistry and microbiology, and the Waikato degree allows me to combine all of them,” he says.

The Beca scholarship will help pay his university fees – he’s already the recipient of a Waikato University school leavers’ scholarship, another from Newmont Waihi offered to the top five students in NCEA at Waihi College, and a government scholarship.

The Waikato BE is accredited by the national engineering professional body IPENZ, and includes a substantial work placement element. For his first placement, Garrett spent last summer working on a University of Waikato Summer Research Scholarship project to extract collagen from eggshell membranes.

“Collagen can be used as a scaffolding for regenerating body organs, among other things, as it is not usually rejected by the body,” he says. “So it can be relatively valuable – we’re talking around $141,000 a gram for some types of analytical grade collagen.”
The project involved finding ways to separate the membrane from the eggshell and extract the collagen. It was a time-consuming business, he says, but initial results have been positive and the project is continuing.

Garrett is president of YES, the engineering society at the university, and he’s also the Waikato representative on the Student Engineers New Zealand (SENZ) council. SENZ is part of IPENZ and its goal is to facilitate networking between student engineers around New Zealand.

Katikati: Kevin Weller
Zimbabwe-born Kevin Weller chose to study mechanical engineering at Waikato because of the smaller class size and the chance to get to know your lecturers.

“I don’t like big cities, so Waikato was a good choice,” says the former Katikati College student. “I like making things and was looking for a way to study that, so I decided to come to uni rather than do an apprenticeship.”

He says winning the Beca scholarship is a great recognition of his academic achievements, “and it helps with the fees!”.

The Waikato BE is accredited by the national engineering professional body IPENZ, and includes a substantial work placement element. Weller spent last summer on a work placement at Auckland-based precision engineering company MetPresco where he had the opportunity to get hands-on with lathes and mills.

“It was very useful to get that practical experience,” he says. “At university we’re trained to do the design, so it’s good to work with the guys who make up those designs – they know things we don’t get taught!”

In his next placement, Weller hopes to work more on the R&D side of engineering so he can put some of his university learning into practice.

ENDS

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