Steven Brison

I am an international student. I was born in Moscow, then I lived in Holland and Switzerland and came to Scotland because I wanted to study somewhere in English. I was intending to do either aeronautical engineering at Glasgow or mechanical engineering elsewhere. I chose the University of Dundee because I saw myself growing here.

When I was around five years old, there was an air show in Moscow and I saw the Russian Knights flying aeroplanes. They fly Su-27s which are very good fighter planes from the Cold War and I told my mum I was going to be a pilot. That is where it all came from and I developed an interest in engineering.

I started the Aeronautical Society. We deal with anything related to flight and promote aviation within Dundee.  For example, sponsored by the University, we are rebuilding a flight simulator. We also have a drone team, Haggis Aerospace. We're building a drone to enter into the annual Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Challenge.

The projects we work on are industry standard. This gives us fantastic experience. My mentality was for the first two years, it doesn’t matter what I am studying in the classroom, because I just join that into these projects in my free time. That also had a positive effect on my studies as well.

If you are exposed to people working on projects like this in your first year, it really helps your modules in the classroom.

The other thing that benefits us from working with the societies is that we get to represent the University at Open Days and that gives us other skills that we can use. It helps us with presentations etc. that we have to give during our studies.