STEM SUSSEX

What is your background in STEM?

From a very early age I was obsessed with anything with wheels.  I got my first motorbike when I was 6 and was involved in motorcycle schoolboy trials from about 8 years old and this fuelled a passion for all things with an engine and wheels.  I was also fascinated by how these things work.
At school I was a good all rounder, but found STEM subjects were my favourite, especially design technology. 

By the time I had completed my GCSEs I knew that I wanted to pursue a career in engineering, but found the A level options available were fairly limiting, especially maths A level, which I felt involved a lot of pure maths “for maths sake” that was not really applied to anything.  I also had a dislike for the examination assessment method which I felt encouraged students to absorb huge quantities of information for a short period and regurgitate it for the exams – more a short-term memory test than learning.  I also really disliked being in such a young ‘school’ environment at 16 years old – being treated like a kid with little freedom. As I always excelled in coursework and disliked exams, I left school at 16 (much to my teachers’ horror) and went to college to study a BTEC in Engineering at college, which was fantastic. 

College not only enabled me to still get into a good university but also gave me a lot of very useful, practical ‘hands on’ experience and was also an excellent transition phase of my life, bridging the gap between school and university.  No uniform, no exams, and even some spare time to fit in some part-time work for money.  I achieved a mixture of merits and distinctions in my BTEC modules and accepted a place at Kingston University, after a gap year growing up, saving money and getting some experience (a reality check) in a variety of full time (but low paid) jobs.

I attended Kingston University from 2002 – 2005 and studied Automotive Engineering.  This was essentially a Mechanical Engineering degree tailored to vehicles, for which I have a passion.  This made the degree more interesting to me than a pure mechanical engineering degree.  It was always my intention to pursue a career within the Automotive Industry.  However, the mid noughties were not a good time for the automotive industry, and I struggled to find a suitable career in the South East and did not want to relocate.  I therefore began to explore other Engineering opportunities, as although graduating in Automotive Engineering, my skill set was equally transferrable to any engineering sector.

Tell us a bit about your work history

After graduating in autumn 2005, I quickly got a job for a local firm as a CAD draftsman designing refrigerated vehicle bodies.  The company were small and a little basic to say the least and after a two month trial period I decided this was not the correct career path and left to look for another job.  After 6 painful months looking for the right job, I had an interview and at CRA in summer 2006, who specialise in safety and risk engineering, and have never looked back.

Were you able to find a job easily when you wanted to?

Personally no, but this was largely due to me being fussy, not wanting to relocate from the South East, and not wanting to go through the ridiculous multi-stage application and assessment centre process adopted by so many large engineering companies these days.  I knew the right job in a smaller company would materialise eventually and stuck it out.  However, now I have a few years experience in a very ‘up and coming’ industry, I occasionally receive phone calls from head-hunters and third party agencies offering me a new job, but am happy where I am for the moment.

What do you do at the moment (in broad terms)?

My main area of work is supporting civil nuclear power generation.  The UK nuclear energy providers (British Energy and Magnox – two of our major clients) have an obligation to prove to the Nuclear Regulator that the risk to the public associated with nuclear power generation is ‘As low as reasonably practicable’.  This requires Probabilistic Safety Analysis to be performed in order to numerically quantify the risk associated with nuclear power generation (i.e. numerically prove that a dose to a member of the public could only happen once in xxxxxx years).

What skills do you use in your job?

Management of time and resources, technical report writing, problem solving, data interpretation, analytical, communication (written and oral), IT, quality assurance, ability to use existing and develop new systems, processes and techniques, apply appropriate STEM techniques to problems and many others.

College and University introduced many of these skills, whilst work has rapidly developed them.

Give some examples of things you do in your day to day work

Much of my time is spent performing Probabilistic Safety Analysis (PSA) which is a very specialist subject and involves many elements including; initiating events analysis (identifying what faults and hazards can occur that may threaten nuclear safety), accident sequence analysis (looking at how such faults or hazards may progress and what safety systems and human actions can be used/taken to overcome them) and systems analysis (where nuclear safety systems are modelled and analysed in detail to calculate the probability they will fail when a demand is made on them).  The process also involves a lot of data collection and processing and studies relating to human reliability analysis (estimating how likely station operators are to fail to perform certain crucial safety related tasks).

As well as PSA, the findings of which I deliver to my clients in large technical reports, I have also recently been involved in the production and delivery of training courses and workshops to British Energy Engineers, independent verification of other consultancies’ technical work and performing failure modes and effects analyses (FMEA) and reliability assessments for non-civil nuclear projects such as for nuclear powered submarines at Devonport Royal Dockyard in Plymouth.

Has your perception of STEM changed when moving between education and work?

Not really.  I enjoyed STEM subjects at school and my perception of them is that a good general knowledge of them is a fundamental part of being an Engineer, with focus on some more than others depending on what type of engineering you’re doing.  People think of nuclear technology being very complicated, but this isn’t always the case.  I have a very basic level of understanding of atomic physics but this doesn’t affect my capability as a safety engineer as we have very little involvement with atomic physics – a subject I still find complicated.

As mentioned earlier I find learning is greatly enhanced when a subject is applied to something.  I now spend a lot of time using maths skills (especially statistics and calculations involving very small numbers in standard form) which I struggled with at school in pure form but find much easier when put into context.  I find that my career, although very hard work, is satisfying.  It enables me to continue to expand my technical knowledge on how complex engineering systems (such as nuclear power stations) work and I have always found understanding exactly how things work fascinating.  It has also enabled me to learn completely new techniques such as PSA.  As far as the future goes, this is also likely to only get better, with a Global Nuclear Renaissance on the horizon and two new pressurised water reactor designs being currently considered via the generic design assessment, prior to being constructed in the UK over the next decade.

What do you do in your spare time?

Spend time with my family
Maintain and drive/ride my car and motorbike
Live and recorded music
Cooking
Occasional foreign holidays when I’m lucky…