Hussain Zadran is an Aeronautical Engineering student at the University of Salford.
For PathFinders, we speak to Hussain about his inspiring story, overcoming his delayed start to education and working hard to forge a successful career in engineering. We spoke to him at Silverstone Circuit during the IMechE Formula Student championship, where he was helping the Salford Racing team build their custom racing car for the event.
“I never went to school, I couldn’t afford it. The people who had money, they could afford it. Sometimes we didn’t even have a house, no food, no light. Coming from a very, very poor background. I came to this country about Year 7ish. It was very difficult. But that motivated me to go out and study because I just knew that was the way out for me, to be able to go out and show the world. I needed to fight my war through speaking and be able to defend myself with speech.
I started studying hard every single day. I was studying, learning English. I passed my GCSE’s, messed up on science a little bit, but it was fine. It didn’t make a major impact.
I got into Kingston College. I started studying level three manufacturing engineering. It was an extended diploma, which was equivalent to three A levels, and I got the equivalent to three A*s. Every single day, seven days a week, I was studying more than 10 hours a day.
I was offered places for university. What I was offered to study at Loughborough for. For me it was a bit too far away. Salford was very convenient for me, and I’ve got family there as well.
My hope is that I stay doing this sort of thing [volunteering for Salford Racing] on the side looking for placements just to make sure I get my experience and knowledge built up. I believe anything is possible there. Things in life have taught me that if I can come from such a poor, war-torn country to the UK, now I’m studying engineering, then anything is possible.”
I want to finish my degree with a Master’s looking to possibly go and get my B license, which is the aircraft technician, and then my C license. To be B licensed is a couple of years and I think C is well over ten years. Then you can become a chartered engineer.
That’s just plan A. Plan B would be go into the Navy, go in as an officer, come out and then you can do anything you like. So that’s sort of the plan I go for. Engineering-wise, I believe I want to stay in the industry as a technician, working physically, possibly for about five, eight years.”
Watch the video above to hear the full exclusive interview.
The Morson STEM Foundation aims to support people from all backgrounds explore and pursue pathways into engineering-related careers. With the immense demand for STEM skills un the UK, Morson Group is investing in education and aspiration, working hard to change lives and ensure a sustainable future for the industry. Find out more about the Morson STEM Foundation here.
Students from the University of Salford enjoyed a challenging, demanding and bittersweet weekend at the home of UK racing, Silverstone, in July while taking part in the IMechE Formula Student competition with their custom-designed racing car.
Europe’s most established educational engineering competition, Formula Student, sees university teams from all over the world produce a prototype for a single-seat race car, which is put through its paces on the Silverstone Circuit to discern a winner. This year, more than 130 teams entered for the competition, which was celebrating its 25th year.
Watch the story of their weekend below:
The Salford Racing team, comprising students from a variety of disciplines, had planned, designed, and built its car from the University’s Maker Space, a state-of-the-art facility funded by the Morson Group, which has also invested £10K to sponsor the car, and provided additional industry training. While allowing for the practical, real-world development of skills and techniques that are invaluable for students of all disciplines, the Salford Racing project exists separately from team members’ curriculums, with the project being completed out-of-hours on a voluntary basis.
The Maker Space is part of the Morson Group’s Changemakers programme, which builds on the company’s extensive efforts – in partnership with the University of Salford, Into University and other stakeholders – to help young people, particularly those from disadvantaged, underrepresented or marginalised backgrounds, to develop the confidence and technical skills to build a career in STEM.
Ollie Parsons, an aeronautical engineering graduate who took on the role of Team Principal for the end of the 2021 season through 2022, talks about the important skills required to make the project work:
“This is a team which is expected to perform as working professionals, to create a car in their own time alongside their studies and do it off their own back. One thing I learned was that you’ve got to motivate people so showing the reward at the end which is Silverstone and the whole design experience. A big thing for me was understanding people, different ways of working.
There was a lot of change between 2021 and 2022. Operating principles within the team and morale boosting, and I hope since then the team have built on that and been able to plan for contingency and making sure that if there’s anything dropping out people coming up to exams getting stressed that they can forecast that and make sure resource is covered.
Morson were particularly useful in allowing students to go on critical courses like welding, fabrication, supporting us in buying beter parts. It makes a massive difference, and the student experience is improved because of it. It gives you that additional edge on other graduates. Aside from the monetary contribution, having the professional workspaces with engineers’ advice, it’s invaluable.”
The 2023 event at Silverstone
The Salford Racing 2023 team arrived at Silverstone on the Thursday of the event and was immediately up against it, with the engineers identifying an issue which required a complete disassembly and rebuild of the engine. As the team were against the clock to make it to scrutineering the following day, along with the rest of the tests the teams must go through ahead of Sunday’s running, several of the group opted to stay up all night.
Hussain Zadran, aeronautical engineering student who designed the side panelling, utilising the water jet facilities at the Morson Maker Space, describes the situation and his reasons for joining the Salford Racing team:
“We had to rebuild it several times but we finally realised that it was something to do with the bearing inside, so we had to strip it up, take the bearing out and then rebuild.
The thing that attracted me to the project started all the way back when I came to the country. Originally from Afghanistan, at 13 I had to learn English from scratch and I’ve always been a person that wants to develop their skills further. I’m foundation year at the moment and I thought I’d join and there’s a lot more to learn.”
The team managed to complete the build on Friday afternoon, making it to scrutineering. Several issues were identified on the car, including lock wires on the throttle cable and clutch, which needed to be fixed before the team could make it through to the following stages. Following passing scrutineering and the tilt test, the team fell short at the noise test. Unfortunately, the engine issues that the team had had on the Thursday and Friday had meant that the car hadn’t been started, and the team was unable to do so at the noise test due to a battery issue. Frustratingly for the team, this meant they ran out of time to complete the tests and that they were unable to take part in the running events on the Sunday despite having a car that the stewards agreed was ready to go.
Nonetheless, it was a weekend of hard work, lessons and inspiration for the team as they look ahead towards making improvements for the 2024 event.
Click here to find out more about how we’re collaborating with businesses to understand their skills needs and aligning them with a strategy for creating career opportunities developing skills, delivering social value, and enabling brighter futures.
We, along with the rest of the world, went to see the Barbie movie this weekend. Greta Gerwig’s lovingly satirical take on the iconic doll, traditional gender roles and everything the Barbie brand represents.
You’d have to be living under a rock not to notice the extensive marketing campaign and hype surrounding the film. Peaking with Margot Robbie channelling a different one of the doll’s iconic looks on the pink carpet at each premier.
The film opens in Barbieland, where every Barbie is living her best Barbie life, in her perfect Barbie Dreamhouse. Meanwhile, the Kens compete for their attention. As Helen Mirren’s wry narrator informs us
“Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.”
Barbie flips traditional gender roles on their head. In Gerwig’s stunning Barbieland, the Barbies are in charge. They hold every position of power (hello Madame President Barbie) and win every award (“I worked hard, so I deserve it”). All while being stunningly beautiful, wearing perfectly coordinated outfits and without a single hair falling out of place. Meanwhile the Kens hold vague titles devoid of any real meaning, as Ryan Gosling’s Ken tells us:
“Actually my job is just beach”.
This has led some commentators to denounce the film as ‘an assault on men’. But, Ryan Gosling’s sheer joy in playing Ken radiates from the screen. The film is just as much about Ken discovering what it means to be a man as it is about Barbie’s journey to form her own identity beyond ‘Stereotypical Barbie’.
Of course, Barbie’s perfect life doesn’t stay perfect for long, and Barbie finds herself pondering death and worrying about cellulite. After a consultation with Kate McKinnon’s ‘Weird Barbie’ and a hilarious allusion to the matrix red pill/blue pill dilemma, only with shoes, Barbie and Ken set off to discover the source of her problems in the real world.
The real world
Barbie believes that women and girls will thank her because:
“We fixed everything in the real world, so all women are happy and powerful”
Only to discover that things are not quite so simple. Self-righteous teenager, Sasha lambasts Barbie, telling her that
‘You’ve been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented.’
Barbie discovers that Sasha’s mother Gloria, played by America Ferrera, is the one who has been influencing her thoughts. Gloria and Sasha’s relationship forms the heart of the film. Fererra’s hopes for her daughter and powerful speech about the difficulties of being a woman in the modern world, will strike a chord with female members of the audience.
“It is literally impossible to be a woman… I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.”
The villain of the piece
Meanwhile Ken discovers the patriarchy. People in the real world call him sir and he starts to believe that he should be able to do any job he likes, simply because he’s a man. Newly entitled, he returns to Barbieland to share the wonders of these patriarchal gender roles with the rest of the Kens. They then build Kendom in its place, brainwashing the Barbies into serving them beer and giving foot rubs.
The film reaches its climax as the Barbies work together with Gloria and Sasha to de-programme their brainwashed sisters and pit the Kens against one another once more. Culminating in an incredible fight scene/dance battle, the Kens’ patriarchal fantasy is dismantled and Ken admits
“Once I realized the patriarchy wasn’t about horses, I kind of lost interest.”
At the film’s conclusion Ken relinquishes the patriarchy and hopes to discover who he is without Barbie, reinforced by the hilarious ‘I am Kenough’ hoodie. While Barbie resolves
‘I want to do the imagining, not be the idea.’
Gloria requests an Ordinary Barbie who is just trying to get through the day, without the pressure to be perfect or extraordinary.
Gender roles
So what does all this have to do with recruitment? Well, Barbie’s exploration of gender roles in modern society reminds us that we still have a long way to go to achieve gender parity in the workplace. The USA is yet to have a ‘Madame President’ in real life, but Barbie has been one since 1999. In the film, Barbie visits Mattel’s headquarters and asks to speak to the woman in charge only to discover that the board is entirely made up of men. Of course, the film isn’t far from the truth as, according to the company’s website, all but one of Mattel’s executive officers are men.
Over the course of the film Margot Robbie’s Barbie learns that her belief that
‘Because Barbie can be anything, women can be anything’
isn’t exactly true for most of us. From the gender pay gap, to the motherhood penalty and lack of representation at the top, women still face significant barriers to progress in their careers. The UK has a gender pay gap of 14.3%. Although enhanced parental leave policies are on the rise, only 1.4% of job adverts mentioned them in 2022. There are only eight women leading FTSE 100 companies. For the few women who do reach leadership positions, they work for 2 years and 10 months longer than men. Small gains are being made at the top, but the number of women in mid-career roles has dipped. Without an adequate pipeline of female talent, businesses will struggle to maintain this trend.
Diversity doesn’t have to be a fantasy
All of this reminds us that Gerwig’s Barbieland, where women achieve greatness in every aspect of life and where every skin tone and body type are represented and celebrated, is a fantasy. (This is a film about a doll after all.) Equally, the film’s patriarchy is an over-the-top performance of masculinity, rooted in machismo and faux fur coats. By presenting these opposing extremes in a fun and flamboyant way, audiences are encouraged to reflect on their own perceptions of the ridiculous barriers imposed by gender roles in society.
At Morson we’re placing inclusion at the heart of the conversation. True ED&I has real impact, not just on the lives of people from all walks of life, but in creating stronger cultures and broader empathy in workplaces across the country.
We understand the complexities and opportunities of widening participation and take our commitment to this very seriously. Our ED&I consultancy services are designed to help clients attract diverse talent into their organisation, improve/create inclusive cultures and help identify barriers to inclusion in the recruitment process.
Boxing trainer Joe Gallagher is an instantly recognisable face in the corner of the ring. A veteran of some 60 amateur fights himself, the young prospect turned his attention to training in the early 1990s, and has since gone on to become incredibly successful, training the likes of the Smith Brothers, Anthony Crolla, Scott Quigg, Natasha Jonas and more to world title successes, many while benefitting from sponsorship from Morson along their journeys.
With Joe’s current stable of fighters now moving back from Bolton to where it all began for Joe, Phil Martin’s Champs Camp in Moss Side, Manchester, we caught up with Joe to reflect on his career journey. He talks openly to PathFinders about his parents’ influence on him, the years of struggling to balance his amateur training with his day job and the strain that it put on him, the golden years of his stable and much more.
What was your earliest memory of boxing?
I think like everyone’s when they were growing up then in that era was watching Muhammad Ali, with my dad. He was huge boxing fan. And Ali because he was so popular, world heavyweight champion and everything, as a child just sat there watching. Then all the other fighters like John Conteh from the UK at the time, he was world champion.
At the time I must have been around eight or nine. I was going mixed martial arts and karate. And then I got to around age ten I was, I was third grade, you know, the brown one more before you go into a black belt and which was in the playground. And someone mentioned that there’d been a boxing gym opening up but wasn’t sure for them. So I told my dad I’d go to the boxing gym.
So I went down and the person whose gym it was that was open was Jimmy Egan. So that’s more known now as Jimmy Egan’s Boxing Gym and wasn’t sure, but then it was known it was in short form and I went there and I stuck with it and I said, the rest is history.
Is it fair to say that your dad and Jimmy Egan were the two biggest influences and biggest role models in your life growing up?
And mum. Yeah, she no, she worked very hard and it wasn’t much money in the house. My dad was always working hard out on the roads and was holding down two or three jobs down at the time. I was the oldest of five and four sisters.
I did want to turn professional at one point, as every fighter does. But my dad was worried that there was no money in it. So, he said, you’re going to come out on the road to me and that’s it going to need to get a proper job. You’re only going to make money if you’re like Muhammad Ali, the equivalent of that generation. So those were the type of conversations or just for right, okay, then. And that was that’s why I didn’t turn professional, and I went into coaching then.
Watch the video above to hear the full exclusive interview.
Now retired and working to train the next generation of fighters, including his brother Will, Joe Gallagher-trained world champion boxer Anthony Crolla speaks openly to PathFinders about his incredible career, both in and out of the ring, and what his hopes are for the future. Click here to hear his story
On the 16th of July 1993, the cinematic behemoth Jurassic Park arrived in UK cinemas. That’s an incredible 30 years ago! Since its original release, the film has spawned a decades-long film franchise, numerous spin-offs, and a vast array of merchandise. Jurassic Park astonished audiences with its spectacular visual effects, incredible soundtrack, and superb cast. It’s no wonder that it’s considered a classic. Jurassic Park’s longevity can also be attributed to its themes, which are as relevant today as they were in the 90s. Particularly the dangers of advancing technology without regard for the consequences.
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Spoken by the character Dr Ian Malcolm, played by the endlessly charismatic Jeff Goldblum. And the idea is significant not just for the film, but also in the realm of real-world technological advancements.
Jurassic Park’s power and unpredictability
In 1993, Jurassic Park’s T-Rex stomped onto screens and captured our imaginations with its sheer size, power, and unpredictability. A symbol of the dangers of creating something that you can’t control, evoking both awe and fear in equal measure.
Technology, and particularly AI has come a long way in the last few years. We’ve seen breakthroughs that have revolutionised industries, improved efficiency, and enhanced our everyday lives. From voice assistants to self-driving cars, AI has proven its potential to transform the world around us.
Both the T-Rex and AI can be described as a leap into the unknown. AI advancements have brought excitement, but there are concerns about the risks involved. We should consider the ethical implications and potential consequences of AI development. In Jurassic Park, the scientists’ control of the park and the dinosaurs proved to be an illusion. This serves as a reminder that while designing AI systems, we need to consider all possible eventualities
Balancing innovation with responsibility
While AI holds immense promise, it’s crucial to balance innovation with responsibility. The unchecked pursuit of AI development could lead to unintended consequences.
To mitigate the risks, transparency, regulations, and ethical frameworks are necessary. Thankfully, there are organisations working towards responsible AI practices, to make sure that AI benefits society rather than causing harm.
There are certain jobs that we should think very carefully about before delegating to an AI solution.
Healthcare diagnosis and treatment.
AI can analyse medical data and make recommendations; it can’t replace a medical professional’s empathy and ability to consider the broader context.
Artistic endeavours.
There’s been a massive surge in AI-created art recently. However many people believe that it is only reproducing and remixing existing artistic styles rather than creating anything original.
Writing job applications and answering interview questions.
We’ve heard reports of AI chatbots that can provide answers to interview questions in real-time. While we understand how tempting this might be, a chatbot can’t give answers based on your personal experience or showcase your unique personality.
While AI can automate many tasks, and make our lives easier, we should think twice before we hand over too much autonomy to it.
Jurassic Park’s legacy in tech
On the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park, we’re taking the message that just because you can, it doesn’t always mean that you should, to heart. The film serves as a cautionary tale about the unchecked pursuit of technological advancements. While we embrace the potential and progress AI solutions can bring, we should also take a step back and consider the possible consequences of our actions before we apply them to new situations.
Helping to advance thinking, streamline hiring processes, speed decision making and safeguard workforces our tech solutions balance technological advances with human interactions, intelligence, and analysis. At Morson, we love to talk tech. Let’s talk tech together. Find out how our tech solutions can support your business.
