New students, new future, new research and a new pool table

Nearly a hundred students are now settled in to their studies at UCMK, the first people to take advantage of the courses on offer at the only campus  University in Milton Keynes.  About half of those students are UK or EU students, the others coming from all around the globe.  It really is a thrilling moment.  A university brings so much to a city.  There is a measurable financial benefit certainly.  Research shows that every million pounds invested in Higher Education generates £1.13m for the local economy.  A university also provides the opportunity for a city to keep its brightest minds close to home and to attract others from outside.  UCMK is very closely focused on the local economy, which is why we are in constant discussion with employers to make sure that the knowledge we teach dovetails with the skills business needs.  Anyone who wants to find out more should drop by on Saturday (30^th November) when we’re holding an Open Day.  For details, take a look at the website.

In a few short weeks’ time, UCMK will be central to ground –breaking ‘Big Data’ project called MK:SMART  which will revolutionise the way our city works and grows.  From the first week in January our experts will be operating and hosting dedicated computer servers which will pull in data about energy, transport and water from carefully placed sensors, satellites and existing data sets held by some of the largest businesses and other enterprises in the city.   It’s a multi-million pound project and an exciting collaboration between the public and private sectors on a completely local level.  The information divined from this big data will inform the way everyone in Milton Keynes lives their lives and it will have a tremendous impact on how we plan for the future.  It’s a fantastic testament to UCMK as an academic institution to be such a central element of the project and it’s something of which we’re all extremely proud.

Our parent University, University of Bedfordshire (UoB) has hit the national headlines this week for a highly acclaimed piece of research into sexual abuse of children by other children.  It’s an extremely rigorous piece of work into a disturbing and difficult to research area of our culture and comes hard on the heels of the announcement that the University has been award the prestigious Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in recognition of its pioneering research into child sexual exploitation.  We at UCMK are very proud of the work being done at UoB.  It reflects well on the level of academic excellence which we insist upon in everything that we do here.

Perhaps the biggest piece of news for our students this week has been the arrival of a pool table at UCMK.  Will it be used to conduct research into the highly complex physics of balls moving around a green baize table?  Probably not, but we do anticipate it will be a hugely popular addition to the leisure facilities available on site for students.  It might even give some of the staff the chance to show that not all their youth was misspent on becoming highly qualified academics and educators.

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