• Question: If you could be president/ Prime Minister for a week what would you do to change the country and spread the word about engineering to young budding engineers

    Asked by Queen_Rae to Abbie, Melanie, Paul, Stu, Tom on 9 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Abbie Hutty

      Abbie Hutty answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      Ooooh, political.

      I think if I had a week and could push one big public message to encourage budding engineers I’d try to get out that engineering doesn’t mean blokes in greasy overalls fixing cars or boilers. It’s such a common view and I think it puts so many people off. It’s so outdated and misinformed. Design engineering, and the work of chartered engineers is just worlds apart from that. There’s the full range – yet whenever people use a picture of “an engineer” in a newspaper its the same old tired picture of a bloke in a boiler suit, or high vis and a hard hat. It’s like the engineer’s uniform. I’ve never worn hi-vis or a hard hat – I wear a dress and heels to work, I work in a clean, bright office, at a computer, or talking to my colleagues, and I design spacecraft. Most people have no idea that that’s what engineering can look like.

    • Photo: Stuart Inglis

      Stuart Inglis answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      I’d make it compulsory (or at least highly advised!!) for everyone to contribute to one big engineering project, like making a giant rollercoaster spanning the length and breadth of Britain!

      That way everyone can step back at the end and think “Oh wow, look what we’ve created. Actually I could do this every day as an engineer!”

    • Photo: Paul Webb

      Paul Webb answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      I would improve the schools to swap religious education for more engineering lesions and improve the educations of young engineers and those that chose Enginering must have 1 day a month to experience a workplace like network rail, jcb, bae, Bentley to see that there’s more out there than they realised

    • Photo: Melanie Zimmer

      Melanie Zimmer answered on 17 Mar 2016:

      I don’t know how it is to be a student here in the UK, but as a student in Germany at a so called “Gymnasium” (we have 3 different types of school after primary school you can go to) we only had a 2 weeks internship to do in year 10 and in our last two years (years 12 and 13) we could attend a few 1 day events at universities to see what kind of programmes they offer. For me personally it was way too less to decide what I want to do in the end or how a work day could actually look like. As a Prime Minister, I would like to make schools more practical by giving students the chance to visit and talk to people in different sectors (not just engineering) more often.

      What would you as a student like to change?

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