International Women In Engineering Day

23 Jun International Women In Engineering Day

This day is about celebrating the achievements of women in engineering.

Please check out the following journey as told by our very own female engineer here at Semester Learning – Hayley Stapleton

“I got into engineering almost by accident really! I was at the local college studying A Levels with my heart set on a career within the NHS I wanted to be a paediatric physiotherapist however when I undertook some work experience I fainted when I saw some of the equipment and realised that it wasn’t going to be the career path for me!

Suddenly I had to rethink and wasn’t really sure what to do. I’d always enjoyed science and technology subjects at school in fact these were the only subjects that I got A grades in for GCSE so when I saw the apprenticeship scheme advertised for the steel works I thought it sounded quite interesting, I’ll always remember in my interview they asked me if I had a preference for chemistry or metallurgy apprenticeship, sounds terrible now but I knew chemistry was my worst of the sciences so I said metallurgy but actually didn’t even know what it was!!

The rest as they say is history I studied day release for my HNC and BEng(Hons) in materials engineering and worked on shifts testing the quality of steels for almost 10 years. Family life and the need for routine saw me make the move into teaching at the college I’d studied at earlier myself.

I have been teaching for almost 9 years now covering many aspects of engineering obviously materials and mainly academic mechanical subjects I cover levels 1-5. Alongside this I am a mum to two amazing boys aged 7 & 8, and have a super supportive husband who without his help none of this would be possible.

Women in engineering need to have the determination to succeed (sometimes against the odds, have a thick skin and a sense of humour) it isn’t hard to be a woman in engineering it’s hard to be anyone in engineering women just need to be better represented”