Amy's career path

Amy is currently studying Chemical and Bio Systems Engineering at The University of Surrey in Guildford and is hoping to spend a year in industry -in Spain. Amy tells us more about uni and her career plans and influences.

What are you studying & where?

I'm studying Chemical and Bio Systems Engineering at The University of Surrey in Guildford with year in industry (hopefully in Spain). My uni is in the South East. Unfortunately we are close enough to London to qualify for London prices everywhere, but not for the extra 'London area' student loan.

How would you describe your ethnicity?

White

Hightest qualification so far?

I have A levels (Maths, Chemistry, Physics and Spanish)

What are your aims?

I want to help get the world to a better place than it currently is, find a more environmentally friendly fuel source and get it into mass usage and generally clean up the planet and make it a safer, greener happier place to live in.

The story so far….

I was interested in engineering because several of my friends at work who had the same interests and abilities as me did engineering. I researched it and found I wanted to know loads about all the different types; I couldn't decide which branch I wanted to specialise in.

I took a Headstart Course and found I wasn't any good at civil engineering, and that I wasn't really interested in mechanical engineering and certainly not systems engineering. I was torn between aerospace and chemical engineering.

I went to as many open days as I could, and I went to talks on both subjects, but still I couldn't decide! I ended up talking with my physics teacher and my chemistry teacher, who were both amazingly lovely and helpful and I was beginning to swing in the direction of chemical engineering, but I still wasn't at all sure. In the end I spoke to my form tutor and school careers adviser (who was an English teacher and so had nothing to do with it and had no biases of her own). She told me that I was already going into a specialised area of work, and that I shouldn't close too many doors. As chemical engineering seemed to have much broader applications than aerospace engineering, that was what I went with. The decision felt right somehow.

Brilliant I had sorted that part out, but I still had to apply to 6 universities! I researched on the web and got down to about 12 universities. When I went to visit them I eliminated most of them (some I didn't like the town, some I didn't like the atmosphere, some couldn't organise a thing and annoyed me enough that I didn't even bother going to see them).

I had 4 I really liked. Loughborough and Manchester were my favourites as I'd done my headstart course in Loughborough - and Manchester seemed fantastic (also when I was there I spent the whole day with some really buff looking bloke and was very excited about the idea of that being a 'sign' or something). Then there was Leeds (I loved the social and a lot of my friends went there) and Birmingham. My mum insisted I apply somewhere in London 'even if i didn't go' so that was Imperial then - and lastly there was Surrey.

When I went to see Surrey I had loved the campus. It was so beautiful, like going to uni in Hyde Park I have said to many people. But at one of the many 'talks' I asked about the possibility of studying in Spain(something I was really excited to do) and was told quite sharply and abruptly that no such thing was possible and everyone had to go on an industrial placement year. So as I said to the nice bloke who was taking me on a tour of the uni 'it's beautiful, but they don't do Spanish, so I'm not coming here no way!' He, being a student, said 'actually, they do teach languages here, and you can do that no matter what course you're on'. I wasn't convinced unfortunately, because I was used to teachers knowing more than students, so I believed the lass who said 'no way' over the nice student.

Anyhow, I had this one space left on the application form, and I really didn't want to reduce my opportunities, and my best friend at the time went there and had been raving about how good it was for engineering - so I put it down. Unlike the other unis I had applied to, the option came up for doing 'chemical and bio systems engineering' I thought that sounded really interesting as I'm interested in biology but not necessarily a whiz at it.

Right, applications done, then it was time to decide on first and insurance choice unis and to go to UCAS days. I went to all of them even though we were only allowed (I think) 3 days off school to go. It was utterly invaluable!

Manchester who I had loved, I suddenly hated. We were talked to by an American who went on about how 'we're all in it just for the money' (which really brushed me up the wrong way as it's not the reason I wanted to do chem eng) - and told us we'd never learn new technologies and methods there, they'd just give us the tried and tested background stuff, cos 'by the time you come out of uni, any new stuff we teach you will be obsolete'. I sat there thinking, 'well same in industry, you just have to be bothered to keep updating your knowledge base! you think I'm gonna wait till my last year of working to actually learn about my instruments cos those ones won't be obsolete!' Also my dad noticed a mistake in some of the data being presented to us by an'expert' of theirs. I was not impressed - so there that was Manchester firmly crossed of my list!

Then Birmingham - I decided that I would be happy there, but it wasn't making me feel excited or eager or just feeling perfect, so that was on the list of 'maybes'.

Leeds had a similar effect, I liked it and thought I would be happy there but it wasn't filling me with fancy notions of excitingness. Another maybe.

Loughborough - well there was something odd about it. When I was there doing my headstart course I loved it. But when I went for the UCAS day, I didn't like it at all! I just got a really odd vibe from it - and the first thing my interviewer said to me was 'I'd like to see how you explain yourself [young lady!]' - cos at the time I'd written my personal statement I didn't know whether i wanted to do aero or chemical, so I'd just been general about it. Turned out my mum got the odd vibe too and was really glad when I decided not to put it down as one of my definate choices. But she didn't want to influence my decision as I'd been so excited about going there after my headstart course!.

Imperial College was nice but they didn't really do anything to show me why I should go there. All the other unis were full of 'come to our uni because we are fantastic at this that and the other, let us show you' but IC was more laid back and 'we have a reputation! we don't really need to show you any more than that'. So I was wondering why on earth they had such a good rep. I couldn't really see them demonstrating any reason for it. Add to that the fact that I came back home from one day in london with my hair smelling of cigarettes and my nose blackened with pollution.

Surrey was BRILLIANT! it was so gorgeous and beautiful and everyone was really nice. One of the lecturers even answered a question my dad had asked at some of the other unis and got shrugs of 'dunno' from, so my dad was thoroughly impressed with it. When I went for my interview I was really honest with the guy and was like 'look I don't think I'm coming here cos I got told there was no option for doing Spanish and I really want to study there'. Turned out he was in charge of industrial placement years and had people in columbia. He said I could definately go to Latin America and he could try and organise Spain for me too. BRILLIANT!

I was also really impressed by the way he handled things. I was explaining a maths presentation I'd done to him and was kinda not getting out the sentences I wanted, cos it is a tad hard to explain how cryptography works without showing examples. He didn't sit there looking impatient or anything, he just handed me a piece of blank paper and a pencil and I (thankfully) got on with it! That said to me that he was good at assessing what was needed in a situation and could cater to individuals, thus v good teacher material! He also gave me his rock band's URL. Everyone else I met was lovely and everything felt right and was giving me sparks of energy and making me really excited.

You would think that was my decision made there (as everyone had offered me a place), but I was somewhat in love with my best mate who went to surrey, and I was really worried that the reason I was excited about going there was based on him being there, and the last thing I wanted was to make that kind of important decision based on 'rosey coloured spectacles'. I still had lingering feelings of love for Loughborough thanks to my headstart course, and I was still considering Imperial cos of its reputation.

My physics teacher suggested I write down a pros and cons list for each uni and give everything marks, tally them up and see which uni won! I did as he suggested and it turned out that Imperial wasn't really in the running, and even if I got rid of all the marks Surrey earned for my best friend going there it was still about 20 marks ahead of Loughborough. I talked it through with my chemistry teacher too and he said 'it's a big enough uni, you might not even see [best friend I fancied] if you don't want to' which surprisingly cheered me up a lot, it made me feel like I was making a rational decision based on liking the university rather than wanting to be near my mate. Surrey gave me the lowest offer, so I had no need to put an insurance choice on my UCAS application, and that was it.

I got 3As and a B, so not only did I get in but as an engineer/scientist with 3 As I got £1000 from the university! Great!

The University accomodation application was a little annoying (I was super early and thus I think it didn't register on the website, so when September came my mum was getting really worried about why I hadn't heard where I was gonna be living. I phoned them up and the woman was like 'oh dear you'd better hurry up and do it! we don't have any choices here that you've registrered with us!' never mind, I applied again and got one of the options I wanted).

But everything was sorted and off I went to uni! It was so much fun and I made so many friends so quickly! I also developed a boyfriend on my 4th day and I'm still going out with him 9 months later! Accomodation was fine, turns out that exactly as I got told by one of the students who took me on a tour, the more interesting people live in the cheap housing, and you make loads of mates cos you all stay in the kitchen and chat to aviod going into your less-than-perfect rooms, but the people in expensive housing stay in their fancy rooms, and don't even have nice chats in their bathrobes cos they have en-suites! :)

All is good, I passed my first year with an average of 83% I was student represtentative for my class last year and this coming year I'm social secretary of the chemical engineering society.

Why this?

I wanted to get into chemical engineeing to find an anti-petrol kind of fuel and get it into general usage, and finding ways to coexist with nature rather than destroy it. I love the idea of flexibilty and change, I know I'm not gonna be sitting at a desk 24/7 but doing exciting things with teams of people, travelling around the world and hopefully helping to reduce the negative effect that we've had on the environment.

Describe your average day.

7:00 Alam clock goes. Hit it to 'Snooze' and go back to cuddling my boyfriend
8:00 Alright already! hit alarm clock to 'off' and get washed dressed and have breakfast
8:45 Leave the house and head off to 9:00 lectures
9:00 - 1:00 lectures; maths, fluid mechanics and themodynamics, engineering desgn fundamentals etc. if there's complexity chaos and systems dynamics then we stop off at one of the uni canteens to get coffee and a danish pastry
1:00 - 2:00 lunch time, living on campus we have time to go home and make something nice like a stir fry, this year we're off campus so we are doing pack lunches! i feel like a mummy hehe
2:00 - 5:00 more lectures; heat transfer, industrial chemistry, cell biology, sustainable engineering, or if it's a wednesday off to sports (i do climbing, or have a long lunch back home and do work)
5:00 - 6:00 studying homework, or reading TCE (the chemical engineer, a magazine you get when you subscribe to the Student IChemE with exciting things about chem eng in it)

Eves - from here it gets a bit fuzzy:

Mondays first aid meeting and stage crew meeting and Martial Arts (by the end of the first term i'd stopped going to any of these).

Tuesday Climbing.

Wednesday Gospel Choir and Martial Arts.

Thursday Chem Eng Soc event (anything from pub crawls to ice skating, watching movies, going for dinner and more!).

Friday out with friends or in watching a movie

All work no play? All play no work?

I try to keep a balance, it is really hard though. The second term I was here almost all my modules were coursework assessed so I had no free time, all of it was spent doing courseworks! It was really frustrating and annoying because I need creative outlets or i get stuck in a rut and go stir crazy! I made time to go to a few things but nowhere near as many as I wanted to. Some of my friends skipped lectures because they had been out clubbing the night before and got back in at 6am for example, I don't think that's the right way to do it either, there's not point paying £3000 a year tuition fees if you're not gonna get an education from it.

As good as it seems?

I try to be open minded, but like I said I was really excited about coming here. Everything is great, I am really happy here, beautiful campus, interesting course, friendly lecturers, freindly students, great sports and hobbies. The only thing is that I'm still quite gutted that our sports centre doesn't have a swimming pool. Oh well, can't be perfect can it :)

Where to next?

Now I have to sort out my industrial placement, in Spain, doing something to do with the anti-petroleum industry, possibly bio fuel cells? .... wish me luck!

Your words of wisdom…

Find out as much as you can, don't just rely on books/the internet, talk to people who are doing this or something similar, but equally valuable talk to people who know very little about it, tell them what you know and see what they come up with, you never know what someone who's not in the thick of it will see that you missed.

Work hard and play hard, organise your time well so you have time for friends, hobbies, studying and assignments. And most of all DON'T FORGET TO ENJOY EVERY MINUTE! if you're not enjoying it then you're not in the right place, no matter how much you think you have to be there.

In your personal life, what lights your fire?

I'm outdoorsy and I love adrenaline rushes. I love broadcasting on hospital radio, meeting the patients and playing their requests to make them feel like getting up out of their hospital beds and boogieing! I love climbing, football, swimming and martial arts, anything artsy-crafty like making clothes.

I also love singing and miss singing lessons badly, but I don't have enough money for them, and I love getting time to practice on my guitar, though i think that's been what's suffered most this year, I think I play worse now than I did when i started uni! oh well. Also, obviously, my boyfriend :)

When I was growing up, I wanted to be…..

Didn't really happen to me! I wanted to do a thesis on the origin of languages and cried my eyes out when my mum told me it had been done (I was like 7). Then when I was about 14, I wanted to be an astronaught, but not for love of going into space, mainly cos I thought that we needed to get off planet earth....

Uh oh moments

I don't know actually, I don't get embarassed easily.

3 things to do before you die…

Save the world, do something amazing sports wise and raise lots of money for worthwhile charities at the same time, pass on my knowledge and enthusiasm to someone who will take it and build on it

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