• Question: How did you get into your curent job?? What did you do immediately after you left school??

    Asked by linda to Alex, Claire, Kate, Marcus, Neil on 16 Jun 2014.
    • Photo: Claire Brockett

      Claire Brockett answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Hi Linda,
      When I left school, after my A-levels, I went to Bedford Hospital to work as a student cardiac technician. I worked in the cardiology department, and on the wards, testing the function of patients hearts. I learnt to do a lot of different tests – simple heart traces (ECGs) which helped show whether someone had a normal heart rate and rhythm, or more complicated tests like using ultrasound to see what the heart was doing (an ‘echo’). During this I also studied for an HNC part time – I went to college in London for one week every 4-6 weeks for 2 years.
      When I was learning about how pacemakers worked and could be programmed, I decided I wanted to get involved with designing and making them. I went off to Bradford University to study Medical Engineering. After 2 years there I went on placement – where I spent a year working in industry – and learnt all about hip and knee replacements… so rather than designing pacemakers, I’ve been working on joint replacements. Since my degree, I then took a PhD based on hip replacements. My first job after that was looking at how knee replacements wear, and now I’m working on ankles.

    • Photo: Kate Niehaus

      Kate Niehaus answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Well, I’m still in school at the moment 🙂

      I knew that I was interested in the human body, but I also liked the applied nature of engineering, so I wasn’t sure what to study in college. Finally I took a small seminar on medical technology, and that made me decide – I want to do that! So I studied biomechanical engineering at my University. There was more that I wanted to learn, so I did a master’s degree in bioengineering (similar but slightly different). There was still more that I wanted to learn (!), and I was interested in doing my own research, so I followed that with a PhD in biomedical engineering, which is what I’m currently in the middle of right now.

      Throughout, though, I had several internships at medical technology companies. One made a treatment device for people with really severe migraines; one made all sorts of heart equipment (pace makers, stents, etc); one worked on improving coordination amongst nurses and doctors in hospitals.

    • Photo: Alex Lyness

      Alex Lyness answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Hey linda,

      Everyone follows slightly different paths.

      I had plenty of jobs as a teenager (In Sainsbury’s, as warehouse worker, in a saw mill, in a pub and on a farm) and whilst I enjoyed them (and the money!) they all made me realise that I wanted to go to Uni and get a degree.

      So straight after school I went to Uni. I picked a sandwich course which meant that I worked my third year on manufacturing lines of a big pharma company. I also worked some Easter and summer jobs at different engineering companies. This experience was great, I learnt a lot about what I did and didn’t want to do as a job when I was older!

      I would advise both before and during Uni to get as much work experience as possible, it doesn’t always have to be relevant (like my teenage jobs) but it will help you understand the type of job you want to do in the future and help you develop skills that will make you employable in it.

      Major kudos to Claire by the way, who shows that you can make different decisions about fitting education around work and at different times in your life.

    • Photo: Marcus Johns

      Marcus Johns answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      The route into engineering was pretty straightforward – chose my A levels and decided that I wanted to do chemical engineering at university, which I went straight into after my A levels (decided that I’d forget all the maths and physics in my brain if I took a gap year) – but the route to tissue engineering was slightly different.

      During my undergraduate degree I spent a year working for a very small company (20 employees) called Mast Carbon carrying out research into using carbon to absorb volatile organic compounds from gas streams. I then went back to uni for my final year and had a few options for what I wanted to do after I graduated. I had got to the interview stage for a graduate engineering job at Mars and had also been accepted onto a 2 years Masters course in environmental engineering that would have seen me spend 6 months in Belgium, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. However, my personal tutor suggested that I apply to the Centre of Sustainable Chemical Technologies at University of Bath, so I did.

      I got accepted and spent my first year doing a Masters of Research, in which I was involved in two projects. The first was looking at creating carbon for batteries from cellulose, which also involved the company that I had worked for in my placement year, and the second looked at using enzymes in a new type of reactor to produce chemicals from orange peel.

      After this I decided that I had enjoyed working with cellulose, but wanted to go into the biomedical/biomimicry side of engineering as I believe that it will become very important in the future. From this I found my current PhD project looking at using cellulose as a scaffold for heart cells. I used to hate biology at GCSE as I thought it had too many essays, yet here I am with biology now being rather important in my work!

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