Alongside my research, I have been a very active member of the Women’s Engineering Society (WES), even taking on the position of chair during my PhD. WES supports and promotes female engineers by offering networking, volunteering, and socialising events. WES has provided me with fantastic opportunities to develop skills in teamwork, leadership, communications, and event management. Also due to LUWES' affiliation to WES national, I have now been able to be involved in engineering gender parity at a national level. My proudest contribution to LUWES is the Female Engineer of the Year Awards, which I founded in 2019 to celebrate the contribution of female undergraduate and postgraduate engineers to academic studies, the Loughborough and engineering communities.
My advice for a future PhD student would be:
- Be organised from day one. You research and generate a lot of writing and data, which can be easy to just save in one folder. When you start writing your thesis, you will be so glad that you had a logical structure from the beginning.
- Embrace the flexibility in time you have to take part in teaching, training, and conferences.
- Enjoy the research but make time for your wellbeing - this is such a unique opportunity, so make it a positive experience.
Studying for my PhD has taught me that I am much more adaptable and resilient than I ever thought I could be.
My proudest moment was presenting my first conference paper at Acoustic 2020. It was the culmination of a lot of hard work to produce experimental work of the required standard. In addition, there was a lot of uncertainty as to whether the conference could go ahead, then the change to virtual due to the pandemic, so it was very rewarding to get to that stage.
In five years’ time, I aim to be working in industry as a principle consultant in acoustics. I also aim to be a chartered engineer and to manage team projects.