What path has your career taken since graduation? 

Having done two summer internships with Arup in the Berlin office during my two last years at university, I discovered the amazing environment, learning and career opportunities the company offered to graduates. Wanting to start as a Maritime Engineer with Arup, following my master thesis in the field, only London and Dublin were options. I applied to both and got accepted first in Dublin. This coincided with my objectives to move to another country, so I accepted the offer. 
Within the company I am starting to transition towards more of a flooding engineer expertise that I was allowed to explore. The company is very supporting in these early career years. 

What is your current role?

I am currently working as a graduate design engineer. I spend half my week on maritime projects and the other half on designing flooding schemes. In my position, I lay the ground work for the other members of the team, doing first assessments, calculations and collecting data. I work in an engineering consultancy, so our work is not very design based unfortunately and we do a good amount of reporting. I spend a lot of time with the topics of digitalisation and automation, creating new processes which make my job more efficient and streamlined. 

What experiences do you feel helped you get to your current position?

Definitely doing two summer internships in the company I now work in, as before my job interview, my current team contacted my old team to ask for a reference. 
Also I highly advise taking advantage of the year abroad, as this is a huge differentiator. 

How have you used the skills and/or knowledge developed during your degree in your career?

I have mostly ended up using the coding skills and engineering softwares we learned in uni. I haven’t applied a lot of the equations we learned yet, but that’s because of the nature of my job in a consultancy. We do however use the first principles learned in uni on a daily basis. Most is learned on the job however. University teaches us to work and think as engineers, the rest is specialisation, learned on the job. 

What advice would you give to students who are interested in your area of work?

My main piece of advice would be to choose a job that lets you freely explore options within the company. At the offset of uni I didn’t really know which engineering discipline I wanted to specialise in (I still don’t really know!) but I work in a company that lets me try out loads of different things. 

This profile was published in August, 2024