Question: when you were younger was this your dream job?

Masha Folk answered on 7 Nov 2016:

When I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. I loved stars and planets and anything to do with space. When I went to university, I enrolled in the aeronautical and astronautical engineering (or aerospace engineering). On this course, we had to learn about both airplanes and rockets flying through the air and I found that I really liked learning about flight. Instead of being an astronaut, I now wanted to make things go really fast – like rockets and airplanes. I studied both rocket propulsion and jet engine propulsion – the rocket propulsion seemed to me to focus too much on chemistry, which I didn’t like, while the jet engine propulsion was more to do with aerodynamics and thermodynamics. So, I stuck with jet engine propulsion! That’s how I ended up doing research in gas turbines. Doing engineering research is really my dream job, though I didn’t know it when I was younger! I love having my own research to do every day. It’s like baking a cake, it takes time, attention, and care and (can be frustrating if you mess up) but at the end of the day, it’s something that you made, something your own. When I’m not a PhD student anymore, I hope to still do research and create new ideas and see them be turned into real products.