Every year on 23 June, AWE celebrates its female engineers to mark International Women in Engineering Day #INWED18, which aims to raise awareness of the number of women in engineering roles and highlight the amazing career opportunities in engineering.
This year we are profiling one of our young mechanical engineers, 22-year-old Preeya.
She’s been with AWE just over two years and talks about her engineering career.
“After completing my AS-Levels I completed a BTEC Level 3 in engineering at college. I was then invited by a major company to join its mechanical engineering advanced apprenticeship scheme. For the next three years I spent my time manufacturing prototypes for potential consumers. When I completed my advanced apprenticeship, I decided that I wanted to follow my dream of working in defence and aerospace, so I applied to be a mechanical engineering technician at AWE”.
Preeya says it’s very hard to choose what she enjoys most about her work: “Firstly I love that I work in electronics and mechanical engineering. It allows me the opportunity to pick up a new skill with some of the most talented engineers in our nation.
“I am very fortunate to travel within my role and see the rest of the world’s R&D work, which is inspiring. I’m still in further education part-time, which is probably one of the best things I attribute to AWE – they never stop developing their engineers! Definitely the exposure to future technology. There is so much incredible tech out there and it constantly blows me away how our industry never ceases to innovate”
She is also a passionate ambassador for attracting people into engineering who may not come from the traditional pool of future engineers: “Our experiences and our mentality makes each of us unique. Different approaches and ways of thinking what science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) industries need, to keep fresh ideas flooding into the industry.
“For example, there are still far fewer women than men in engineering and I believe it all boils down to exposure and perception. When I was in school, we always studied maths and physics, but were never aware that engineering ties it all together.
“There is lot of misunderstanding of what engineering is actually like. It helps to bring young people to STEM events, to show them what we do and try and inform young people as best aswe can what it’s actually like to work in the STEM world. I’d like to bring back ‘take your daughter to work’ days. The more role models that girls and women see in engineering, the more we will see applying and I’m doing my best to make that happen.”