• Question: What's the most important thing/best thing about your job?

    Asked by becky to Abbie, Melanie, Stu on 17 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Stuart Inglis

      Stuart Inglis answered on 17 Mar 2016:

      Hi Becky,

      I think the most important thing about my job is solving problems, which also happens to be one of the best things about my job too.

      The problems can come in all shapes and sizes but a good engineer will tackle them head on and most likely come up with a number of solutions, then pick the best one. This variety and creativity in the job makes it the best things about it too!

    • Photo: Melanie Zimmer

      Melanie Zimmer answered on 17 Mar 2016:

      The most important thing about my job / as an engineer in general, and as Stu said, is solving problems. Engineers aim to help other people and we only can do this if we understand the current situation and try to come up with a way to improve it, i.e. to solve the problem.

      And the best thing about my job is that it never gets boring! There are new things to learn and solve almost every day and you get to meet interesting people.

    • Photo: Abbie Hutty

      Abbie Hutty answered on 17 Mar 2016:

      I’m not sure on what level you mean important and best – to me, or to other people?

      My favourite thing about the job, day to day, is the challenge of designing new things to solve problems in ways that no-one has thought of before. But on a kind of higher level the thing I enjoy most is that we are designing stuff that is going into space, and helping us to develop our scientific understanding of not only the world around us, but our solar system and how the Universe works as well. So I love learning about all the other cool projects that are going on around the company, and hearing about them launching, and the science they send back.

      Our satellites let people communicate, send back sky TV, let us watch sports events live on the other side of the world, tell us about the damage after natural disasters and help us to send resources to the right places, and tell us about how humans are affecting our planet- half of the key indicators for climate change can only be measured from space. So apart from the kind of pure science stuff like gravity waves and mapping stars and finding new exoplanets and looking for life on other planets and stuff like that – which is all great science and really exciting – the work that my company does has a lot more very practical applications that affect millions of people’s lives, as well!

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