Profile

My name is Ayla and I live in Lincoln with my boyfriend and our 1 year old puppy George.

I am originally from Scotland but we moved down to Lincoln in 2019 and I was luckily able to transfer my job from the Glasgow office to the Sheffield office.

Outside of work you will find me either doing a craft project, volunteering as a scout leader or playing the sims.

homemade christmas crackers!

homemade face mask!

Blair Athol Scout Camp – 2018

I studied a Masters of Civil Engineering at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh.

In the summer between my 4th and 5th year I was lucky to be offered a summer placement at Mott MacDonald working in the Water Team.

Over 8 weeks I worked in the water team ranging from reprofiling rivers, reservoir design, water treatment works and looking at drainage for new housing developments. It was really interesting to be part of this team and to learn about how much work goes into getting clean water from the sky to your pipes!

Following graduation I started my big girls job in the geotechnical team in the Glasgow office. What I find so interesting about geotechnics is the chance to work on different projects everyday as everything civil engineers do have an element of geotechnics in them!

At the start of a development the client will come to us and say ‘I want you to build me a new hospital on this plot of land’.

The first thing we will do is have a look online and do a desk study to identify anything that might cause us problems in building here. We will look at the ground and see if its strong enough to build on and also look at old maps and see if the land might be contaminated by nasty pollutants (unfortunately our ancestors weren’t as environmentally friendly as we are these days!).

Once we’ve had a look online it’s time to design a ground investigation. This is when we will do some surveys to find out the ground composition underneath our new hospital. We want to know if the ground is soft – our hospital might sink! We can do lots of different types on investigations; we can use a digger to dig out a rectangle into the ground and see what the ground looks like. Or we can use a big drill and drill into the ground to get a core sample of what it might look like (think piercing a straw into a slice of cake and getting a cylinder of cake, except the cake is soil!).

Can you see the two different layers of soil in the pit??

Now we know how strong or weak the ground beneath our hospital is, we can design the foundation to make sure our hospital doesn’t wobble, sink or lean like the Leaning Tower of Piza!

Geotechnical engineering isn’t just about the ground beneath buildings; we also design flood walls to make cities safe from flooding, we help to design new railways and roads to help people get where they need to go and so many different projects!

I have been working as a civil engineer in the geotechnical team for 3 and a half years and I am really enjoying the variability, the chance to keep learning and the chance to design and make my mark on the world.

I have been working from home and unfortunately had to give up some of my craft room so it can get quite messy and distracting! Especially with a doggo around!!

Today I had a catch up meeting with our client where we discussed a few railways projects that we are working on at the moment. Once the meeting was over I started checking a report that one of my team members had written about the redevelopment of a train station in the North East. Once I had checked that I updated a ground investigation specification that I had written before but since we issued it to the client we received some more information that has highlighted part of the railway track is bumpy and affecting the trains!

The most interesting thing about geotech is how different every day can be! Next week I am going to be out on site in Leeds supervising a ground investigation !

Currently within scouting there are badges focussed on science and digital technologies, however there aren’t currently any badges on engineering. I would love to be able to put this money towards helping create resources to assist scout groups to introduce engineering to their younger sections!

I personally didn’t know about engineering and especially as a young girl always thought of it a ‘boys’ job but thankfully through scouting I was able to find a passion for building and designing. I luckily had scout leaders involved in STEM careers, which some may not have, so being able to provide the resources to help include this in there programme would be amazing!