Profile

I graduated in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Leeds last summer. I grew up in the North East, but in September I moved to London and started a graduate scheme at an electrical engineering firm. I’m a keen sportswoman, I play lots of netball and do a bit of climbing, running and rugby. I love to get out and about and explore London, my favourite area so far is Spitalfields Market in Shoreditch. Over lockdown I have watched all 10 seasons of Taskmaster and tried to start a herb garden.

My pronouns are she/her.

As part of the graduate scheme I get to rotate around different areas of the business. But. at the minute, my job is to design ‘smart buildings’. These are buildings which use special sensors to control heating, cooling and lighting in the building so that the building wastes as little energy as possible.

I make the software that allows the sensors and controllers to talk to each other.

IMG_0358 If I was working from home, I work from 8:30am until 5pm. I am usually working on 2 or 3 different buildings at once and so will divide up my day so I work equally on each one. I use software on my computer to build programs that make the equipment in a build turn on and off at the right times, so no energy is wasted. I use information about the building from the customer to design a solution that is unique to that building and that controls that building in the best possible way.

Once everything has been designed and built from home, I go to site to install everything. I would usually get to site by 8am and set-up any equipment. Then, I would to talk anyone else working on the project to learn about any problems that need fixing or changes in the work.

After that, we would test that the sensors is working and that they can talk to the computer and to each other. We repeat this until we know everything works as we designed.

I would run a campaign that shows how many doors are opened by an engineering degree and the skills you learn doing it can be applied to almost any job!

To do this, I want to offer virtual work experience days to schools who are unable to run work experience programs due to lack of funding and problems related to Covid-19. This will give students the opportunity to speak to current engineers and make good contacts for future jobs. It will also give them a taste of how exciting it could be to be an engineer and the type of things you could do day-to-day. Giving them the opportunity to actually do it is better than listening to me explain it- so hopefully will get lots of people interested!

There are so many big, scary problems in the world, and engineers can design and build the solutions to them! I want to use this fact to inspire more people to choose engineering.