I completed my placement year after Part B and ended up working at a brewery doing energy management. My job required me to refine their manufacturing processes by looking for inefficiencies in terms of the electricity, water, gas, and effluent. I was then required to find low-cost solutions to these inefficiencies to maximise energy savings. This was an invaluable experience that required me to draw upon much of the engineering knowledge that I’d learnt in the earlier parts of my course. I was required to understand the flow of energy behind many complex manufacturing processes which the thermodynamics and fluid mechanics modules in Part A really helped with. The course teaches you how to be a good problem solver and this is something that was fundamental to my placement because I needed to find appropriate solutions to the problems I was finding in their processing, working within tight deadlines.

I hope to go into the automotive industry or some other form of engineering in future. I’m currently doing my final year project on the degradation of lithium-ion cells so it would be nice to explore this as a potential career path. What is nice about doing an engineering degree is that it opens many avenues in future and allows you to enter many different industries due to the vast number of transferable skills that you obtain along the way. You can go into professional services, consultancy, finance, and many other career paths all of which I could easily consider when I leave.