Wednesday 23rd June is the 8th global annual celebration of International Women in Engineering Day, an international campaign of visibility on social media, that aims to shine a light on our diverse engineering role models, and encourage more people to consider engineering as a profession for all.
This year, women students and staff from EEE have been sharing their journey into engineering and their proudest achievements, along with some words of advice to girls and young women who are thinking about a career in STEM.
Maëlle Guerre is a third year undergraduate student on our Electronic and Information Engineering (EIE) course, with a interest in FPGAs and Machine Learning. Maëlle is a STEM mentor for Imperial College, and has recently developed a COVID app which is being used in schools.
How did you become an Electrical / Electronics Engineer?
“Curious about how a computers work, I applied for EIE to get an overview of how to build a computer from scratch as well as a deep understanding in the specific subfields that I love — digital electronics, programming. I’m currently interning at Morgan Stanley, on a 6 month placement as part of my degree course, building Machine Learning models to automate tasks. I am hoping to join High-Performance Computing to learn how to use FPGAs for fast trading, and research the power of hardware over software.”
What is your proudest achievement as an engineer?
“This year, I helped a French high school by building an application for COVID, to track students showing symptoms and warn of potential cases. The French education department was interested and I now have a startup building similar apps for the rest of French high schools. I am proud as this prevents the school from closing when there is a single case of COVID-19. Students can be warned/stay at home depending on the contact they have with the person infected.”
What is your proudest personal achievement?
“My proudest personal achievement was to follow my ambitions in sports. I love weightlifting and fighting, so I joined Muay Thai in my first year. I now have taken part in several fights, and feel more confident and strong than ever!
This is important to me as all of these activities are labeled as ‘manly’ and I used to shy away because the girl/boy ratio in EEE is already so unbalanced.”
What piece of advice would you give to a girl who is thinking about studying EEE?
“Time taught me to just do what I really want because waiting just adds delay, this is the advice I would give anyone applying to a new, different course. You don’t know what it’s like until you try!”