-
Asked by upmostword95 to Adam, Alexander, Aron, Jess, Neil on 10 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by shashvitha.
-
Jessica Marshall answered on 10 Mar 2014:
I sometimes find it hard to say no to exciting work, and so end up with lots of things to do! Although I do like some pressure, and multitasking. Perhaps the harder things are that I have to exert some authority with international teams, possibly because I can look quite young. But, as soon as I work with them then it is fine. I find that in the UK, the general public don’t know what an engineer is – some people think that I fit Satellite TV dishes to people’s houses when I tell them my job title – the reality is so different. In other countries being an engineer is as well regarded as being a doctor or lawyer, because the education you have is understood. So, we need to work to change that in the UK.
-
-
Adam Scott answered on 11 Mar 2014:
Because I came to the UK for University, because of what Jessica has said about engineers being recognised in other countries, this meant I needed to apply for a job within the UK, as my UK degree wasn’t ‘accredited’ by the professional engineering institution in Canada. That would be the first difficulty – once I become a Chartered Engineer, that will change (Chartered Engineers are internationally recognized).
The other difficulty was deciding what I wanted to do! There were some things I enjoyed at university which I thought were pretty fun, but I wasn’t sure I’d like doing these jobs every day. There are so many options for what a person can do, for example I have friends working for formula 1 teams and car manufacturers working on aerodynamics, crash simulations, suspension design and passenger comfort to name a few… -
Neil Bowles answered on 11 Mar 2014:
Definitely trying to balance lots of different projects at once! As I’m at a university, I have teaching as well as research projects to work on and getting the correct balance between these different bits of my job is hard. We also have the chance to work on lots of really interesting stuff (I was asked to do some work for a possible exoplanet mission today for example), but have to be really careful not to overcommit. Who wouldn’t want to help design a space telescope to study planets around other stars…. see what I mean!
The other difficulty is keeping going when an idea you have worked on for a long time doesn’t make it (you don’t get ‘selected’ is the phrase). There is only a limited amount of money to fund new missions and space agencies have to choose. This happened to me recently, but you just have pick yourself and try again. Eventually, you’ll get there. It took three attempts to get one of our instruments to Mars, but we got it there in the end and its still working.
-
Aron Kisdi answered on 12 Mar 2014:
It has been said before me: time management.
24 hours is just not enough to do all the cool projects, catch up on the latest science and fix just one more bug in the code for the robots. Also some sleep is needed too. The solution is to focus on the important things and work with others to achieve your goals.
Comments