Tribune News Network
Doha
The University of Doha for Science and Technology (UDST) hosted its largest co-curricular event of the academic year, the annual UDST ‘Skills Day’, recently. The event offered more than 50 different competitions and activities around campus in Engineering Technology, Computing and Information Technology, Health Sciences, Business Management and Academics, simulating a variety of real-world challenges that students would tackle in the workplace once they graduate.
UDST ‘Skills Day’ was an opportunity for students and faculty to showcase the projects they had been working on throughout the year and how learning at the university was all about building experiential and technological competencies required in the world of work. More than 750 students competed against their peers to test the technical skills they learned through their studies.
Dr Salem Al-Naemi, president of UDST, said: “Skills Day is all about the approach that UDST undertakes to reveal the importance of applied education. It is one of the ways we support our students and empower them to be capable of using the latest technologies and have the right skills to answer the labour market’s needs. The event is an opportunity to demonstrate what our students have learned throughout their educational journey at the university and how they use their skills and hands-on competencies to innovate and harness technology to better serve the community.”
UDST Skills Day included many interactive educational and fun activities and competitions such as: gear train designing challenge, welding, leak testing in the pipeline, network design and cabling, renewable energy and sustainability activities, testing technician safety, engaging in health scenarios and skills stations, cyber security challenges, internet of things, programming and problem-solving, robots’ races, green screen digital communication, egg drop stem challenge and much more.
UDST also partnered with local schools to offer hundreds of secondary students the chance to witness the competitions and try a skill themselves, giving more young people the opportunity to be involved in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Some competitions were completed individually, while others were group competitions where students in teams solved real-life scenarios and participated in business simulations in addition to challenges in the fields of electrical and mechanical engineering, energy and sustainability, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
