Columbus Mais-Harding
Doceo Alumnus, Civil Engineering Student at the University of Bath
One of our mentees, Columbus Mais-Harding, embodies and exemplifies the mission and impact of Doceo. Columbus is a now Year 13 student studying Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Economics at a selective state grammar school and his two years of consistent, dedicated participation in the Aspiring Leader programme (ALP) that Doceo offers gave him a platform to build and develop his personal branding, leadership and networking skills. His recognition of the importance and power of the business skills our programme teaches gave Columbus motivation to test and utilise them in his developing professional life/career.
In Summer 2022 Columbus secured internships with BP, Siemens, and a motor racing team. Columbus attributes these two internships – BP and Siemens – as a direct result of his involvement in the Aspiring Leader programme. Columbus would actively follow up and maintain contact with the industry mentors that our programme introduced him to, and he says that the skill-building sessions of the ALP kindled the start of many professional relationships that Columbus, through directed time and effort building/maintaining, has been able to profit from. The BP and Siemens internship opportunities came from engineering professionals that were introduced to Columbus by the mentors leading our skill-building sessions (who Columbus followed up with). The opportunity to spend time with a racing team, Columbus says, was made possible by the confidence he gained from the ALP. In the Spring of 2022, independent of the ALP, Columbus launched a focused campaign to secure racetrack experience for the summer – cold emails, cold calls, and starting conversations with ex-Formula 1 engineers resulted in him securing unprecedented access to a racetrack and motorsport team. Columbus is a young man that took and ran with the opportunities Doceo afforded him. Columbus, for being only 17 years old, has achieved incredible professional success.
Looking to the future, Columbus aspires to study engineering at university. In his UCAS application this year he hopes to secure offers from Cambridge and Bath, and aside from his academics, he is continuing his volunteer work supporting Doceo’s web development team (something he started in Summer 2021 wanting to support Doceo’s charitable efforts). Columbus, a result of his summer internships, has nurtured and built himself three professional mentor-mentee relationships with industry-leading engineers. He is also in ongoing communication with a Formula 1 team, NASA, Amazon and several other large and highly-innovative engineering firms. Columbus is building around himself the environment that our free ALP provides to GCSE/A-level students. We are proud that the ALP has given Columbus the tools to secure himself internships and mentoring relationships. We are proud of Columbus for using the resources around him to take steps towards achieving his personal goals, and we are delighted at the fine young man he is becoming. We are very excited to see how Columbus’s professional ambitions develop in the coming years.