Designing the Future: A L F I E
THOMPSON
The most striking aspect of talking
to Alfie Thompson is his air of
quiet resolve, which he credits to
a life-changing decision he made
at Winchester.
I
‘Things don’t happen
to me now. I want me
to cause things to happen’.
34 The Wykeham Journal 2018
n his first couple of years at the school, he says,
he was adrift. ‘I would spend my whole time in
Mill, just making things,’ he says. He loved the
feeling of being able to think through a problem and
then designing and crafting a solution to it, but didn’t
consider it as a path for him at university and beyond,
partly because it wasn’t widely viewed as an academic
subject or one with safe career prospects.
However, he gradually realised that he didn’t
just love it – he was also good at it. Around halfway
through his time at Winchester, Alfie decided it was
time for him to take a different approach. ‘It was
about picking myself up. I said to myself: “I’m going
to really get this. I’m not going to be a balloon in the
wind anymore, I’m going to forge my own path.”’
And he made a vow to himself: ‘Things don’t happen
to me now. I want me to cause things to happen.’
He decided to pursue Mill further, but at first
wasn’t sure how. In the real world, the closest job
to ‘making lots of stuff in Mill’ seemed to be design
engineer. But while he was confident enough in his
design skills, he wasn’t sure he had the aptitude for
maths or pure science needed for the engineering
part. Nevertheless, he applied for an MEng at
Imperial College, London’s Dyson School of Design
Engineering, founded in 2017 with funding from
inventor and entrepreneur James Dyson.
Now in his third year of the course, Alfie
will be one of the School’s first graduates. He is
currently looking for a six-month placement at a
company, after which he will return for his final
year on the course. When we spoke, he was in the
midst of a module on robotics, coding human-
seeming arms. ‘It’s incredibly difficult to do,’ he
says, laughing at his own frustration. On his sleek
website (www.alfiethompson.co.uk), he offers
glimpses of some of the 15 or so projects he has