• Question: what is the most difficult challenge you have had to overcome? did you overcome this obstacle?

    Asked by wombat to Ashwanth, Jeni, Mark, Natalie, Stephen on 14 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Mark Gowan

      Mark Gowan answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Wombat
      It would be installing a tunnel under a high speed railway, whilst the railway was still operational. You didn’t read about it on the news, so it must have worked!!

    • Photo: Jeni Spragg

      Jeni Spragg answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Hi wombat,

      It would probably be having to stand up and present my work in front of an audience – it’s always nerve-wracking! Especially when you’ve been working hard on something, and it’s a bit complicated to explain, but you want to do it justice.

      But I am trying to get better, so I keep practising and I think it is making me more confident all the time. Now when I present, I feel like I do better than I did a few years ago, so that’s progress 🙂

    • Photo: Natalie Wride

      Natalie Wride answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      Hi wombat 🙂

      On my last project one of the jobs I was put in charge of was working out why things weren’t going quite as well on site as they should have been. It was really challenging – the people on site were blaming our design so I had to figure out if we had overlooked anything or if they had. It’s really difficult to do this when the project is in a different country and you just have use photographs of the project!! It turned out the pictures were showing water dripping from a hole down the wall into the excavation – the Engineers on site had not put enough drains in when they were digging down to make sure the water in the rocks wasn’t going into the excavation and making it unsafe.

    • Photo: Stephen Richardson

      Stephen Richardson answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      Hi Wombat – the others have given you some really interesting examples of engineering challenges they’ve overcome and to be honest my examples probably arent quite as dramatic as thiers!!
      But I think often the biggest challenges that we have to overcome are the internal ones. I find that I sometimes struggle with lack of confidence to speak up if I am with people who are older or more senior than I am – especially if I think that the thing I need to say might not be very popular.
      Its much easier to just keep quiet and not rock the boat.
      Have I overcome that?
      I am getting better – I’ve found talking to people I trust about it has really helped.

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