Alumni Share Their Perspectives on Engineering By Alice Bradshaw
Top Left: Ray Ball | Top Right: Radhika Sharma | Bottom Left: Khadijah Ismail | Bottom Right: Amy Williams
The latest Perspectives Lecture hosted on Zoom by Bolton School Girls’ Division brought together three alumni (Old Girls) to speak about their varied experiences in the field of Engineering.
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he audience gathered virtually to enjoy an interesting and informative evening. After a brief welcome from Mrs James, Head of Lower School Careers, Year 12 student Laweeza Ali introduced the trio of speakers: Khadijah Ismail (Class of 2017), a fourth year aerospace engineering degree apprentice currently working at BAE Systems; Radhika Sharma (Class of 2015), a Mechanical Engineer with the British Antarctic Survey; and Amy Williams (née Worsell, Class
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of 1997), a Chartered Civil Engineer and senior manager at Highways England. Khadijah was the first to share her route into engineering, which began with the positive experience of receiving an Arkwright Scholarship. She went on to explain why she chose a degree apprenticeship, the challenges of balancing university with work commitments and the opportunities she has to work with world-class engineers and both see and help implement real-world applications of theory. Moving on to highlights from her workplace experience so far, she shared some of the exciting projects she has been part of and how her work placements allow her to see ideas in all stages of the ‘engineering life cycle’. She also
LANCASHIRE & NORTH WEST MAGAZINE
recently met with Prime Minister Boris Johnson alongside a group of other apprentices and graduates to showcase the opportunities within the technology sector and at BAE Systems. Her key takeaways were to ‘be real and be proud of who you are’ and to always be enthusiastic, as an enthusiastic person can learn the technical skills needed, but a competent person cannot be taught enthusiasm. She also said that there is strength in saying, ‘I don’t know’ as doing so can create another opportunity to learn. Finally, she shared a poem about engineering that she wrote for her first public speech. The evening’s second speaker was Radhika, who studied Mechanical Engineering at Newcastle University. www.lancmag.com
