Profile

Hi my name is Sarah; I’m 30 years old and live and work in Warrington near Manchester for a company called Amec Foster Wheeler.

I became an Engineer in a round-about way, I always wanted to be a pilot in the RAF when I left school and so decided to study Aerospace Engineering at Manchester University; it’s always a good idea to know how a plane works in order to fly it! Unfortunately it wasn’t until midway through my degree that I found out that I was too short (I’m only 4ft 11) to become a pilot and so I was left wondering what to do. I decided to continue with my degree and after a brief spell of working at McDonalds following graduation I landed my first proper engineering job and I’ve not looked back since!

My current job is working as part of a team who help to design the mini nuclear power plant which powers the Royal Navy’s submarines around the sea. Our job is to check that the design will work and more importantly to make sure that it will work safely without harming the submariners. It’s a really important job with a lot of responsibility. You need to have a good knowledge of how everything works and fits together so that you can understand what might happen if something was to break and then change the design to stop it happening in the first place. Every day is different and a new challenge which is why I love my job; plus how many people can say they’ve been on a submarine! I’m currently working on the design of the new nuclear power plant that will be fitted into the Successor Class submarine.

When I’m not at work I love going hiking, mountain biking and most of all travelling. My favourite places in the world are New Zealand and Thailand and this year I’m off to Iceland. Also, I’m a member of the Army Reserve as part of 103 Regiment Royal Artillery, where I am a Gunner. Here’s a picture from my travels and from an Army weekend:

Every day is different; one day I might be visiting one of the Naval bases in Scotland or Portsmouth, the next working on a report at my desk and attending meetings by Skype, or I could be on a training course to increase my knowledge of the science and technology behind the nuclear power plant.

I spend quite a lot of my day problem solving, thinking about how we might change the design to make it safer to people and easier to control. Sometimes problems are quite complex and so I have to organise meetings with lots of different experts so that we provide the best solution there is, which can be very challenging.

There are also a lot of opportunities to get involved with other projects outside of my normal day job. Once a fortnight I go into schools and run a STEM Club and I also go to a lot of careers fairs. Also, I organise our team days out where we go bowling, for a curry, or to watch cricket – which makes work a lot more fun!

I first went to the National Big Bang fair in 2013 as a volunteer, and I’ve been going ever since. The Big Bang Fair is the largest celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) for young people in the UK. If you haven’t been to one then go and ask your teacher if they could organise a trip right now, because it’s awesome! There’s everything from Viking ships to robots, to learning how to weld using bars of chocolate to explore.

Unfortunately, our stand at the North West Big Bang Fair hasn’t had many exciting interactive activities for everyone to try in the past year, as the equipment we use is not always available to take as it is being used on a job. Here’s our stand from last year.

Therefore, I’d like to use the money to build an activity to explain more about nuclear technology and the work we do, that will always be available. I’d like to take the activity into schools and other careers fairs as well as the Big Bang Fair so that lots of people can see and use it.