• Question: With so many different fields to choose from in Engineering, why did you choose the particular field you work in?

    Asked by hannahgrimes to Alex, Chris, Harriet, Jed, Ken on 13 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by danielvisser, 09lforeman, chloe123, sam987, u29morley.
    • Photo: Ken Gibbs

      Ken Gibbs answered on 11 Mar 2012:

      I chose water as my main line of interest because I have always enjoyed the things you can do in or on the water. Like swimming, surfing, sailing, fishing and so on. Even my mother remarked that I liked water so much that I never walked around the puddles – I always walked through them.

      Having been born and brought up in Zimbabwe which can be very dry, we always were made aware of the importance of conserving water. My father built a number of earth dams on our farm (for irrigation and fish farming) and so it was no surpirse that my first engineering job was on the largest concrete double-curvature arch dam in South Africa which is now named the Gariep Dam (check it out on Wikipedia).

    • Photo: Harriet Fletcher

      Harriet Fletcher answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      When I went to university I knew I wanted to build stuff but had no idea what and around halfway through the course I had a bit of a crisis because I have always wanted to make the world a bit better and building cars or planes or bombs didn’t seem to fit in with that. After university I thought a lot about what interested me and how to apply engineering to that in an environmentally friendly way. Similar to Ken, I am never happier than being up to the neck in water so it seemed like a good choice. After that I chose to go back to study water treatment and the rest is history as they say.
      Although it took me a long time to get there it was well worth not rushing in to choosing a career because I found the one that was right for me in the end.

    • Photo: Jed Ramsay

      Jed Ramsay answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      Water engineering is a very wide field and the bits I really like are building things and working in floods. I get to do both of these things and also like the fact that what I do makes things better for people by making the rivers better to enjoy or to help stop people being flooded.

    • Photo: Alexander Zacheshigriva

      Alexander Zacheshigriva answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      This is an interesting question. Took me a while to think about this one. I think a lot of my choices were due to the disciplines that I liked. When I was choosing what type of engineering to do I decided to go for Mechanical because I imagined designing moving things is more fun than structures or electronics.
      Than it took me a while to decide what sort of job to go for, my short list was: product design, oil and gas, renewable, power plant engineering and shipbuilding. A lot of it was because I enjoyed thermo- and fluid- dynamics courses at uni and they lend themselves to energy related work. Large ships have a lot in common with power plants, well, basically because they have one or a few on board. And in general working with ships sounded exciting to me. So when I found out that a large ship yard near me is hiring graduates I was instantly sold.

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