Guest Lecture - Kelly Smith - Thames Valley Local Resilience Forum

Recently, our BSc Intelligence, Security and Resilience students welcomed Kelly Smith to BNU. Kelly is the Head of Strategic Innovation at Thames Valley Local Resilience Forum. Her presentation brought to life the learning we have done throughout the course helping students to think through the relative benefits of preventative actions ahead of a potential crisis event versus remedial (response) actions to clear ups dn recover from an event.

This final module of the course is called "Intelligence, Security and Resilience applied to the Real World" and gives our third year students rich opportunities each week to visit and meet practitioners and employers across a wide spectrum of professional activity and to reflect on how their degree learning can be applied in those workplaces. Listening to our third year students discuss professional matters reinforces the success of our approach: we are unashamed to have high expectations of our students, whatever their academic start-point, and and we support them to achieve beyond their initial expectations, building self-confidence and professional approached to projects as well as growing their technical knowledge. Our graduates are equipped solve real-world problems in a structured, auditable manner from day one of a new role.

Examples of where our recent graduates are now working in the national intelligence services, such as GCHQ, in an overseas foreign ministry and in the UK National Crime Agency.

We include guest lectures in every module so that our students can learn from those at the cutting edge today. It also gives them the opportunity to develop the confidence to interact with professionals and to develop their personal networks as they start to look for their first graduate job.

Thank you to Kelly for a fascinating talk.