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The Smallpeice Trust recently met with Finlay Cuffe, a former Arkwright Engineering Scholar. Finlay completed his scholarship in 2017 and has recently secured a position as an electronic engineer at McLaren Racing. He will also be mentoring the current cohort of Arkwright Engineering Scholars sponsored by McLaren.

How did you discover the Arkwright Engineering Scholarship Programme and what motivated you to apply?

During secondary school I had a fantastic DT teacher, and she was familiar with the Arkwright Engineering Scholarship, so she was the one who put me forward for it. I was very keen on DT; it was my favorite subject. I spent a lot of the time after school doing a lot of things, messing around in the workshop. I did some research on the scholarship and thought it would be a brilliant opportunity.

What were the key advantages and opportunities that came with being an Arkwright Engineering Scholar?

Things that were very useful to me at the time was the funding I received. I wanted to undertake a project that could cost more than you’d be able to do with pocket money. I went on to build an electric mountain board, and obviously there would be costs associated with it. I was able to acquire everything I needed, but not only that, with the additional funding that goes towards the school, we were able to acquire some new tools that were very useful both for my project and others.

School budgets don’t stretch very far, so having that really enabled lots of different projects to take place, not just for myself but the students alongside me.

What was your most memorable or rewarding experience as an Arkwright Scholar?

It was that opportunities snowballed from the initial scholarship award; I created the electric mountain board, and I then went on to exhibit it at The Big Bang Science Fair at the NEC in Birmingham which is a large competition. That led to me exhibiting another project the following year, which then put me forward to another competition, the Intel ISEF in America, where I went on to achieve third place.

Can you describe your journey from completing your education to securing a position at McLaren?

After completing the scholarship, I went to university and did a master’s degree in electronics at the University of Surrey. I then worked for a company called Kaon, which works in the defense sector, where I worked for around 2 and a half years. I wanted to apply for something a little bigger and work on some larger projects, hence I applied for McLaren. I went through multiple rounds of interviews and as part of my CV, it had all these various projects I had worked on during school.  At university, you don’t get much time to work on your own personal projects, so many of those experiences came from my free time during secondary school.