PP Stuart Williams with Fran Bumpus and Prseident Paul Lockley

This year’s winner of the Bob Lampitt prize for the best engineering student Fran Bumpus, told us her interesting story. As a girl she was interested in technology, building a radio set  at 15 for example. When it came to university time she was persuaded to study history at Cambridge. History was alright and she met her husband, an archaeologist. When her second child was approaching secondary education she went back to technology and enrolled for a Wolverhampton University  engineering degree in Mechatronics – she had done physics, maths and further maths at A Level. She was one of three girls in a cohort of 90 and is the first mature female engineering student of the university. We found her story interesting and she tolerated our struggle to understand Mechatronics – think of a controlling device between a  power source and a motor.   A worthy winner of the prize. Stuart Williams