Although I didn’t know what engineering was when I was younger, I was always fascinated by how things worked and would often disassemble items around the house. My interest in engineering continued through secondary school and was reinforced through my design and technology and art classes.

Although I didn’t go on a placement, I did take part in the Innovation Driven Enterprise Academy (IDEA); it is a summer programme offered by Loughborough University for engineering and business students to work in multidisciplinary teams to develop student-proposed business ideas. My team consisted of two engineering and two business students and together we set off to develop an affordable waste management system to help tackle the problem of recycling contamination (when materials are thrown in the wrong bin, causing the entire bag of resources not to be recycled due to contamination). We hoped to improve recycling rates and reduce long-term costs in medium to large sized organisations.