• Question: Why did you decide to become an Engineer and do you enjoy your job?

    Asked by 698heak36 to Alex, Carmel, Kath, Sean, Steve, Valerie on 6 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by Lily.v, Elles.
    • Photo: Carmel Howe

      Carmel Howe answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      When I was in High School we went on this STEM outreach day at a local engineering company…We got to play with pneumatics to make a robot and that experience stuck with me.

    • Photo: Kathryn Thomas

      Kathryn Thomas answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      I genuinely didn’t realise I was going to university to do a degree based in an engineering department when I applied. Since I had a dramatic rethink about my career at 19 I hadn’t really been paying attention to a lot of other possible careers so suddenly here was engineering, with all these amazing and really different possible careers. My dad has been an engineer all his life so suddenly I starting chatting to him more deeply about it and saw what an exciting job it could be!
      I have only been ‘in’ engineering for a year but I do really enjoy it. It’s a great mix of trying to really understand and play with scientific ideas and also trying to make a difference to peoples lives. And I get to do cool things like this!

    • Photo: Valerie Bentivegna

      Valerie Bentivegna answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      I chose to study bio-engineering at uni. The primary reason was that I liked all sciences and also maths and didn’t want to have to choose just one of them. In bio-engineering, we had to do them all!

      At the moment, I can’t really say I enjoy my job. I am in the last few months of my PhD and things haven’t quite worked out the way I hoped. But, silver lining, I’m in the last few months so I am applying for new jobs 🙂

    • Photo: Sean Doherty

      Sean Doherty answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      I wanted to have a job when I could invent things a solve problems, I enjoyed PE and science at school and medical engineering really interested me. Here I am now!

    • Photo: Stephen Lang

      Stephen Lang answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      I didn’t really decider to become an engineer. When I left school my best mates mum told us we should apply for a job where she worked. It was an engineering apprenticeship and I’ve never looked back.
      I wouldn’t describe being an engineer as a job, to me it’s more the type of person I have become.

Comments

  • Photo: Carmel

    Carmel commented on :

    and yes I do enjoy my job. Every day is something different. I can be in the lab making surfaces or playing with brains…I can be writing, developing code to analyse data or even teaching students about engineering.

  • Photo: Sean

    Sean commented on :

    And yes on the whole I love my job, though parts are boring and parts are stressful it is very fun and rewarding.