Katie Bennett secures a placement with Arup by attending Future Female Engineers!

I had been interested in Arup as a company since starting my second year at university and being encouraged to secure an industrial summer placement. My interest was spiked when seeing some of the hugely prestigious projects that Arup had been involved with. One of them being very close to home, the engineering building that I have studied in for 90% of my university career The Diamond, an £81m multidisciplinary engineering facility for the University of Sheffield.

Around the same sort of time my university was advertising the Future Females Engineers event, which was conveniently going to be hosted in Arups’s HQ in London! The application for the Future Female Engineers event was a straightforward example of what to expect from a placement application, this was really useful as an opportunity to practice for the real thing. The telephone interview was also very straightforward, there was no need to stress as long as you had prepared! I researched all the companies attending and concluded that I was most interested in Arup and Wates. This was asked about in my interview and I was put with these two companies on the day of the event.

At the event during the team building exercise I was put with Aman Gill, a recruitment officer who works for Arup in London, as my team’s mentor. She told us a lot about the recruitment process at Arup and what they value from their potential employees. I took Aman’s email address and contacted her subsequent to my application to the summer placement opportunity for Arup Sheffield. Aman was in contact with the Sheffield office supporting my application.

I was so pleased when I got the confirmation of an interview for the placement and was so grateful that I had been able to attend the event. I also mentioned attending the event to my interviewer at Arup and they seemed to be impressed with my efforts. What I took from the event was the importance of interest and passion with a company in helping to secure a placement. I was really interested in Arup as a company before the event and I made this clear in my application.

The placement itself has been really interesting! I’ve been working in the MEP building services team as an electrical engineer and have travelling around to Nottingham and Liverpool with my team to meetings and site visits. I’ve been working mostly on a high rise residential building in Liverpool developing the schematics for all the electrical systems inside the building, for example, working on the telecommunications schematic, fire alarm treatment drawings, doing lighting calculations and working on containment layouts. Arup was a fantastic company to secure a summer placement with, the support from everyone was great and the facilities are impeccable.

I was inspired by all of the female engineers that I met at the event whether they were just aspiring or qualified. I had never felt such a friendly and positive atmosphere at a networking event before. I was also pleased to see my team at Arup being very balanced in its representation of women which was so refreshing to see in such a big engineering consultancy.