My name is Taklima Begum-Ali and I am a year 10 student from Cheney School. This is a summary about my exciting week with Oxfordshire Apprenticeships.

On Monday, my first day, I visited Abingdon & Witney College with Melanie to show a briefing to students, within the college, about various exciting independent projects that will allow them to put their photographic skills to use and help them gain experience.The briefing took place in a small room with Mandy and Megan, staff members of OxLEP. They explained the projects so well and clearly, that I also wanted to do the projects as it seemed so fun to do... After the briefing, we arrived at the art exhibition in the college that was created by other students themselves. It was very amazing to see such a variety of final art pieces because you could truly see the originality shining off each art piece. One particular thing that amazed me was seeing that the exhibition didn’t just include drawing but also videos, short documentaries and animation clips. You were able to express your creativity in any shape or form.

On Tuesday, I spent the whole day in the amazing RAL science centre in Harwell. It was really fun and great to see the young students from year 7-8 interact with the hands-on activities that were arranged, such as creating solar cars. It was also very interesting to learn about the ISIS programme. The young students worked together in their groups and created solar powered cars. They were all given a budget of £100 and they had to buy different materials that would make their cars very efficient whilst remaining in their budget. To end the day, we were entertained with STEMs got talent. Four scientists shared either a quick presentation or an experiment about four different topics. The students then had the power to vote for the best one.

On Wednesday, I relaxed in the office and was given different tasks to do independently which was very nice as there was no rush to complete the tasks. A couple of examples of the things I did were create a PowToon PowerPoint about Oxfordshire Apprenticeships 2016 review and prepare bags for the Oxfordshire Apprenticeship Roadshow that takes place next week.

On Thursday, I travelled all the way to Didcot all by myself for the first time by train!! At first, it was a very scary experience but then I got used to it and became much more confident. I travelled there because I had to hand out leaflets about the roadshow that will be taking place in Milton Park. It was also my first time visiting the place - and it was huge because many businesses were located there. It was a very exciting experience.

On Friday, I travelled on the 300 bus to the park and ride to meet one of the staff members and join them at a meeting in Witney. Again, this was my first time travelling to park and ride and Witney! This whole week taught me lots and helped gained a lot of independence. I have now gained confidence to travel to areas which I am not familiar with and I am not afraid to ask any questions of things I am unsure about.

See a summary of my week and some photos at: https://storify.com/OxonApprentice/taklima-s-work-experience-week.