Graduate stories

Creativity and curiosity are at the core of how I perceive the world around me so, subconsciously, I think I have always been an engineer at heart.

However, it was in secondary school that I took the first formal steps towards engineering. While the subject itself was not offered at the secondary school I attended, I chose science and art for my Leaving Certificate subjects, believing that engineering is a combination of these two schools of thought (and I wasn’t wrong!)

At first, it was a love for creativity, design and problem solving. Later on, the prospect of pursuing a career in engineering simply seemed like a smart idea; it offers a stable platform for many careers and has a global reputation for excellence.

Moreover, the skills you learn studying and practising engineering are transferable, and operating within a solutions-driven sector teaches you to be a critical, innovative and analytical thinker. These are highly desirable attributes in many career paths.

Ultimately, I believe that engineers are at the heart of communities and serve to improve them – I want to be a part of that and contribute to the betterment of society and the environment.

The variety of work, diverse stakeholder network and scale of impact are aspects of my career which took me by (pleasant) surprise. Engineering projects have the ability to impact positively at local level but can contribute to a regional, national or international strategy by offering knowledge transfer and influencing best practice.

Modern engineering methods require openness towards innovation and encourage holistic approaches. Increasingly, we procure and design in a collaborative digital environment that includes BIM, GIS and data management.

Engineering has diverse applications and the success of projects relies on multifaceted teams and collaborative input. As a professional in this field, I am not just an engineer I am a planner, a designer, a scientist, a social entrepreneur and an advocate for environmental sustainability.

Collaborative working at the forefront of sustainable design in a fast-paced environment is definitely what makes my career most interesting.

Engineering is a continually evolving sector; technology and governance move quickly and things are never stale in this profession – I rarely do the same thing day in, day out. The rate of change makes for a challenging and exciting career.

I anticipate that the opportunity to influence the move towards a smarter, more sustainable and resilient future within the context of modern challenges will be the most exciting aspect of my career over the next five years.

I see these challenges to include mitigating and adapting to climate change, ensuring energy security from indigenous resources, and the transition to a technology-driven economy which decouples GHG emissions from economic growth.

Don’t hesitate. Whether you love to crunch numbers or are more interested in contributing from a strategic level, engineering is so diverse, offering excellent opportunities for a career where you feel like you are making a genuine difference. If you are curious about the world around you and how you can shape its future, then engineering is for you.

I finished secondary school in the late 1990s. At that time the Irish economy was starting to ramp up and I was beginning to see more infrastructure development around Ennis, where I grew up.

Watching these projects progress and seeing how they changed the built environment around the town really was a major influence on my decision to choose civil engineering. I was also fortunate to have some extended family working in engineering who were always a good sounding board.

In the first years of my career I worked almost exclusively in landfill and waste management infrastructure design with RPS. This was certainly not an area I would have envisaged for myself when I started or even finished studying.

I really enjoyed it, however. So much of the early learning was ‘on the job’, which was hugely refreshing. Like most projects in civil engineering, it relied on the integration of various disciplines: geotechnical, drainage, roads, environmental management and so on – affording me good exposure to these fields.

As a civil engineer within a multidisciplinary consultancy like RPS, I work almost daily with a wide variety of specialists from other fields – environmental scientists, ecologists, hydrogeologists, noise specialists – delivering projects for our clients that will leave a positive mark on the built environment.

Playing a key role in this large interaction of skills, from concept stage through to construction is perhaps the most interesting aspect. I also worked in Australia for a number of years where project drivers and climate were quite different to here, so having to adapt your skills to suit the environment makes things both interesting and challenging

We are now seeing more of our projects being realised through the intelligent 3D model-based process of BIM.

Over the next five years, these advancements in technology will offer engineers of all levels the opportunity to develop new skillsets in order to more efficiently plan, design, visualise and construct our projects in a way that we have not done before, which is an exciting prospect.

An engineering qualification will present you with opportunities in areas that you may never have considered. Talk to as many qualified engineers as you can across different disciplines to get a feel for what we do.

Don’t get hung up thinking about how the economy may be performing by the time you qualify – these are all just cycles that no one can really predict. So if you’re keen on engineering, go for it