hello everyone welcome back to my channel F1 aerodynamicist today we're going to talk about part 3 of the playlist that we are creating how to get a job into F1 and yes today we're going to talk about the highly comparative student placements that F1 teams offer to graduate and undergraduate students as a means or a playground to kind of see if they are up for it you know so we're going to talk about the timeline the procedure and the value that it brings to you and your career we're going to talk about the software skills that you might want to have before you apply for a position that you will eventually Master as you go into your placements we're going to talk about why formula student is important in my opinion before your application for a student placement we're going to talk about the HR round and what is the philosophy of the HR round based on all the applications that I've given to different F1 teams in the Aerospace Giants that I've applied for um they're gonna go over some of the frequently asked questions across all the social platforms and some of the private messages that I get on LinkedIn and on Reddit we're going to talk about the reality of what the placement is all about there is this idea that you have before you apply for it and then what actually happens when you get into it we're going to talk about it from a more philosophical perspective obviously because I cannot get into the details but let us still dive into it then [Music] foreign [Music] so let us first talk about the student placement and what is the timeline what is the procedure and what value it brings to your career so in terms of timeline teams are kind of flexible when they give out applications they usually start between September or October and you should get a result of your application by the start of December or the end of December usually but I have to say that you need to keep one thing in mind exclusively that is the applications are one year in advance yes so if you are applying for 2023 September intake you should be applying for September 2022 and a lot of people are either late to the party or just don't know this so so just so everybody knows this that's the process in terms of what value it brings to your career it brings enormous value because your skill sets heighten up most importantly because when you get selected as a student placement in one of the F1 teams what happens this they don't treat you like a student really so you know it's not like a normal internship where you are given a project and off you go then they treat you like a full-time employee so whatever expectation they would have from a full-time employee three months inside your student placements those are your expectations and that is the value that it brings because it gives you a playground to understand if Formula One is a playground for you to understand what are the kind of skills and and what are the kind of Demands that it requires from your personal and professional life and understanding this is really important in terms of procedure it's quite straightforward to be honest it's like any other job application you have to submit a cover letter and CV to start with make sure you watch my videos on cover letter and CV I can ensure you they're going to bring value to your application so check them out they should be in the same playlist and then if they like your cover letter and your resume to the profile that they're looking for you'll normally have a written round in which you'll be be asked fundamental questions and if your fundamentals are strong then you should be able to clear it quite easily and then you'll jump on to the technical route in which you will be assessed on group activities or you'll have physical interviews with the HR with the manager with your future manager hopefully and all of these activities are there to kind of assess your technical capability and your personality and to check if the values of the company align with the values that you have and then you have grown over the last couple of years and this is the process actually it's quite normal it's nothing extraordinary it's just that the stakes are really high and the competition is really high well let's go into the software skills uh on an overall level what's really important is that you have a design skill set you have uh understanding of the analysis tools that normally people use in the industry and how do you post process data in terms of numbers and also in terms of images and how do you derive uh quantities which are important for your analysis from the simulations that you've done so in terms of Big Industry leaders right uh you have to say that design Katia and NX is are The Big Industry leaders out there so make sure you learn surfacing in either of this platform and it's really important to understand what is the philosophy of surfacing because surfacing is one of those things where you have to think a lot before you even start and especially where you get into like parametric surfacing which is quite difficult and it's one of those things that you have to kind of do to learn and also to understand from mistakes what should be the philosophy which you with which you should approach the problem so make sure you spend some time with surfacing on either of these Platforms in terms of analysis The Big Industry leaders out there are star CCM ansys and open form and obviously you use this software to pre-process in the form of meshing say for example and then solving based on whether you're solving a cfd problem or a strong structures problem and then to set up the entire simulation and to automate it so these are the three big platforms that I used uh across the Motorsport F1 and Aerospace Industries and in terms of post processing uh people use Matlab or Python and even better view when it comes to cfd specifically and the idea is that a lot of us a lot of the teams actually land up using tools with which they can kind of customize it for themselves and what kind of results they would like to see based on the best practices that they've learned over years so most of them develop their own post processing tools I get asked a lot of times what teams use what softwares and what platforms obviously I'm not at the Liberty to say this but I can tell you three ways in which you can derive this by yourself the first one being job descriptions read the job descriptions that are put out by companies they do give an indication of what platforms they use the second are the profiles of the people who do those jobs normally people who've left will give a hint of what platform they used and what projects they worked on and that kind of makes you understand what platform you can work on if you're targeting a specific team and the third most public giveaway is sponsorship if you see that sponsor on that team on that car chances are they're using that platform to make their simulations or to design their products so in these three ways you can kind of derive by yourself which team uses what platform and again there are lots of public groups up there such as Reddit and Linkedin through which you can ask questions and find out if you are specifically thinking of you know gaining uh experience on a certain tool but I can pretty much tell you that these are the tools that are across the industry are used and if you are able to gain like a design analysis and post Pro skill set in any one of those tools then you are pretty much ready to go into your student placement with a lot of confidence let's come on to formula student then and why I think it's important you know a lot of students and a lot of aspiring candidates say that they're really passionate about formula one and you need to kind of substantiate that like what have you done outside your curriculum to go above and beyond and to try and show the HR that you've invested time into your passion and formula student is the perfect opportunity to showcase your passion also because in Formula student the kind of projects you'll take are chances are that you will take up exactly the same projects or similar projects going into your student placements and and you meet a lot of interesting and like-minded people and especially for me when I went into a different culture in Italy it was a great way of integrating into the culture and meeting people with whom I had to build a relationship to kind of get the team working and going so I learned teamwork and how teamwork Works in Italy thanks to my formula student experience with more modern racing and it was a wonderful experience and you'll come across skill sets that you thought you didn't even have to learn this happened with me as I was part of the MMR team in the form of an aero lead for their 21 season and I had to learn a lot of skills related to setting up the car running the car on track making sure you get data and the data is post process setting up test plans which I never thought would be a part of my role initially because I thought okay I have to kind of design a fast car and make like really innovative solutions and you know get those downforce onto the car yes but then you also learn a lot of other things which you didn't expect and that's part of the entire process of formula student and why I think formula student is extremely important as you go and apply for a student placement also formula student is just a great place to express yourself and to make good friends and experiences which you'll remember for the rest of your life so please do take the opportunity if it's available in your college next up let's talk about the HR rounds now having applied for a lot of jobs yes even I struggled initially so having applied for a lot of jobs in F1 in Motorsports and in the Aerospace sector and going through the HR rounds I've tried and understand what the philosophy of the HR round is and what do you want to take away from that round right so I've kind of kind of framed a couple of questions which I think are really important and some and I call this questions as personality deriving question because the whole point of an HR round is to derive your personality and check if that personality meets or fits the requirements of the company so it also kind of tells you how the candidate would do during his student placement or during his job so some of the questions which you can get asked depending on what you apply for is like in Formula One why formula one right because it speaks volumes about um your passion the way you answer this question why aerodynamics or why electronics or why vehicle Dynamics again because it speaks volume about your passion and how you're gonna go the extra mile as and if you get this job and um people ask you about give me an example of process Improvement that you've done and your strengths and this is a very typical question because HRS like to understand if you like to go into the system or kind of look at the system and say hey here's an opportunity to improve and if you are aware about your strengths as a human being or as a student as you've gone through your professional and your academic life the third question is give an example of disagreements that you've had with your professor or with your friends or in previous professional experience and how did you come out of it productively or kind of still solving the problem even though you had a disagreement with it and all this kind of falls back on the wide experiences that you've had throughout your academic life your personal life and if you've had some professional life and people also want to understand what are your weaknesses and this is a very important questions all HRS ask and the idea is to understand if you are self-aware of what are potential opportunities in your personal and professional life that you can grow in and again very important question everybody's answer is different do not try and pick up like conventional answers that are there on internet make sure that your HR interview is always personalized uh another question they ask you is what is the biggest challenge in life you faced again very personal question to try and understand your perseverance through these challenges that you've kind of developed um and then solving problems individually to try and understand do you need a lot of supervision or can you kind of leave him to solve his own problems you know this is again a key quality that HRS look for and then the most unusual but makes a lot of sense the question they ask you is what did you do for this interview preparation and this is a question which kind of speaks volumes in terms of how important this interview is for you because you can say how passionate you are you can say all the great technical things but if you are not prepared for this interview and you cannot kind of tell them the importance of this interview for you then it kind of breaks down your entire argument that you do not take this seriously so make sure you kind of have answers to these questions or questions based on this theme which kind of help you derive personality traits about yourself and again these are not some hacks or some magic questions that you should know answers to these are simply some of the questions which I've been asked in all my interviews um and some of the common questions actually that have been asked across all my interviews and I feel that the question in itself is not important but what are the qualities that the HR is able to derive from them is the essence of this conversation the next one is the frequently asked questions that I get asked and yes it's regarding Visas so a lot of international students because obviously the big teams are in the UK ask do companies sponsor visas uh for y'all to work and the answer is some of them do and some of them don't um the best indication is the job description if not mentioned explicitly chances are they do for example uh during covert times McLaren Aston all the other companies Alpine they would exclusively say that you would need the right to work uh in in an EU country or in the UK and only then you could apply and applying to those companies is kind of meant for a failure you know so apply to companies such as the big ones Red Bull Mercedes Ferrari which as far as I know are quite open and are not limited by demographics when it comes to Visa so the big companies do this uh the smaller teams uh depends really on the situation from year to year so you have to check that out in the job description and the second question do you travel often with the team now the answer to this question actually depends which team you work for chances are that if you work for a bigger team you actually do not get that much track experience in a budget cap chances are that that's what's going to happen but if you work for a smaller team for example uh chances are that they might allow you to go for more track experiences than the bigger teams and um the reality is that as an engineer especially as a student placement you're not going to have much track experience going out onto the track until unless the track role is specifically for the student placement in that case obviously you would go but if you are going to work in the company chances are you don't go to too many races especially as from the team you know as an engineer in that role and the last thing I want to get into is the reality of a student placement you know you have a particular idea of how the student placement will be and is it really that now the reality is that if you're a top team and if you are winning all the time um maybe like Red Bull this year and like Mercedes in the last couple of years then your race weekends will look exactly like this you know where you're celebrating in the Ops room or with your friends the victory but if you work for a smaller team or even a bigger team and things aren't working out quite right chances are you're gonna look like Toto wolf on your weekdays yes there's a lot of frustration if your Concepts don't work not maybe like any other job because there's a lot that counts the clock is ticking and you're always trying to push the limits and sometimes you tend to associate the failure with yourself but do remember that the failure is just part of the journey and it is the fuel of pushing your concept or your limits even further on so it is very interesting and engaging yes but it's also very frustrating and it's not all the Showcase and all the Jazz that people think that it is on TV you know people who only watch TV and think how formula one should be it's not all of that it's a lot of hard work by a lot of smart engineers and a lot of frustrating days and nights when things don't work out but at the end of the day with a lot of collaboration and teamwork from a lot of Specialists you can make it and you will make it provided you go in the right direction so this was my attempt of kind of going through the student placements and what are the important skills um how you can kind of take some tips for the HR rounds the frequently asked questions and the reality of the student placement program again these are not some hacks that you can apply for a specific team when you're applying for a student placement program the video is aimed at bringing value to your application and to your interviews as you go into this really comparative student placement program that you might have worked for over 10 years so I hope this video brings value to it if it has give me a like and do let me know some of the questions that might be on your mind in the comments down below if this entire Series has brought value to you do consider subscribing and do consider sharing with your friends who might find this useful again I'm sure and you're watching F1 aerodynamicist foreign