Rachel has just contributed to the Concord student 'Spectrum' Magazine which is written by students for students who are interested in STEM careers. Rachel's advice offers a great deal of insight that alumni will find useful and interesting too. We hope you enjoy her memories of Concord in 2015 too!

In this article find out:

• Rachel’s top tips for getting top marks in exams
• How to make sure nothing about your university degree surprises you.
• What it’s like to study engineering at Imperial (and how to get a ‘First’).
• How applying early for an internship can pay off (and learn about the application process at Dyson).
• How women can succeed in the world of engineering.
• Key developments in the satellite industry and why action is needed.
• Rachel's memories of Concord 10 years ago

What were your Concord highlights?

I was in Paul house, that girls boarding house was brand new back then so everyone in 6.2 was fighting for it! That was good memory, we all enjoyed having our own quiet space, we could study in our room quite comfortably or go to a library. The dining room was also a highlight (especially compared to the canteen at Imperial College!)

We would knock on each other’s door in the morning to wake each other up and go for breakfast. It was a lovely time and the friends I met there are still my friends right now.

Paul House students, Rachel is bottom left

What were you like as a student? What would your teachers say about you?

I did basketball, volleyball, a bit of soccer, weightlifting… everything. I pretty much spent all my evenings in the sports hall to unwind after evening Prep, just be productive. I’d get everything done and then go to the sports hall. I enjoy sweating a lot, because for me, it is the key to like sleeping well and I needed all my sleep during my teenage days. That was that was how I got through the two years at Concord -  just hard work and then sweat, and sleep, hard work, sweat and sleep!

Dami won the Albert Leon cup and Rex and Rachel were runners up

I had Dr Beech and Mr Arthur for chemistry and physics and then for maths, I had Mr. Martin and then Dr Bernasconi who was my applied maths teacher. And then I had Doctor Brennan for my EPQ.

I think my maths teachers would say I was very hardworking. Just before 6.1 our maths teacher will give us all these prep exam papers, I’d complete them all then ask for another set, so they gave me more and more till had I finished all of them. So then I went through all of the current curriculum past papers and finished all of them too, and eventually I ran out of stuff to do. Although completing all those practice papers wasn’t necessary, I enjoyed the quick wins, getting them done quickly then going to sports hall. 

And then for the science side, I prepared differently and my teachers would say I had an interesting approach; I used the sports hall during the exam period when it was empty. I would learn things by studying in the gym, so associating things I had to memorise with a gym routine. So, for example, if I was doing some heavy lifting, I associated that to something I needed to learn by heart and then I do another set of workouts for something else.

Leavers dinner with Rachel on front row right

When you decided that you wanted to do an engineering degree, was it something that you always wanted to do?

I was committed to STEM before starting middle school, so even before coming to Concord my GCSE subject choices were STEM oriented.

I looked at different aspects of science, like natural sciences and engineering between 6.1 and 6.2.  I spoke to various Concord alumni who had already started doing engineering at university and they explained the differences between the different engineering courses.

Then I did another summer course between 6.1 and 6.2 at Stamford, that was pure science - quantum physics - to give me exposure to that subject. My EPQ was in civil engineering as I wanted to give it that try – doing an EPQ gives you good enough exposure to really dig deep into that subject.

By 6.2 having explored all my options, I was committed to aeronautical engineering as my main interest was aviation, though I did apply for mechanical engineering as one of my UCAS choices – I just explained that I had a passion for all things moving, particularly massive structures; pieces of metal becoming something functional and impacting the population on a daily basis.

What universities did you consider?

I looked at Bath, Bristol (a typical aero powerhouse) and UCL for mechanical. Each of them look for something different from applicants so I didn’t worry too much about my personal statement.

Having done so much research, did anything surprise you when you started university?

I spent so much time speaking to Concord alumni at Imperial that I wasn’t surprised at all. They told me exactly what to expect and what happens if you don't put in the work and how far you could slip behind. I think that's the main difference between Concord and Imperial. If you miss two weeks, you slip a lot at uni, but at Concord, teachers are there to help you.

How much time did you have with your tutors and professors at Imperial?

Not a lot, you get one hour session with your tutor every week. But that's not one to one, it's more of a group of one to five, one to six, at least that's the case for most engineering degrees. I think for natural science, it’s slightly better, but that's the basic mandatory session. And then if you do want a bit more support, you can use their office hour book in time to see your professors. They usually have two hours per week that you can book in, personally I didn’t need it.

How hard is it to get a ‘first’ doing engineering at Imperial?

For engineering degrees, they tend to weight the 3rd and 4th year over the first two years, so that’s the work that really counts. But it's not going to mean anything if during a 3rd and 4th year you spend all of your time applying to internships and jobs, and then your academic results fall behind.

For me, I was quite fortunate, I avoided a lot of stress as I already had a graduate job offer from Dyson after my 2nd year summer internship there. When everyone else was drowning to stay on top of all the workload and job applications, I could concentrate on my academic progress and extra-curricular activities.

During 3rd and 4th years, you don't see everyone in class anymore. You see maybe half of the cohort so it's really down to you how you manage your time, but everyone needs to put in the hard work.

Can you talk a little bit about your Dyson internship and how you got it and what you're experienced there?

Every engineering department will organise a series of industrial partners coming to give you an evening lecture. When Dyson came to do a presentation, my original goal was to get the free pizza!

The Dyson programme allowed non-penultimate year students to apply so I did during my 2nd year of a 4-year program. I had nothing to show, nothing like a portfolio or previous work, only had my transcript and going through their online screening tests. At the assessment centre (for 10 candidates) we did individual tasks, design tasks, some proof of concept and group tasks. They had observers throughout the day rotating in and out of different events to observe us, give us a score on how we approach a problem or how we explain ourselves.

Six of us got an offer. At later rounds of assessment centres there are fewer places available so they are harder to get through – so apply early.

Back then I think Dyson had around around 50 to 60 interns every summer and 20 of them stay for the entire year. So instead of just doing a summer internship like I did, they do a full placement year.

A lot of them tend to come from University of Bath because they have a very strong sandwich year culture and are geographically close to Dyson HQ.

During my last 2 weeks I was actually presenting my work to full time engineers to replace one of their existing tools that was based on Microsoft Excel. They liked what I did - a multi physics simulation tool based in MATLAB which is a coding language instead of an Excel spreadsheet.

I’m lucky I picked that topic as that there was already momentum for this project - they knew they had to replace the Excel based tool to something based off a modern coding language. Because there was already stakeholder buy in, I didn’t need to try to get the project resourced. All I needed to do was deliver the codes, demonstrate their accuracy and convince them it’s easy to use.

I got really positive feedback and received a deferred job offer for two years later, as well as a job reference in case I didn’t take it up.

I also decided to become the Dyson ambassador on campus, so during the 3rd year and 4th year when they had staff coming over to give a presentation, I jumped in for like extra 5 minutes to give them my opinion.

I also did my master's thesis with Dyson which was sponsored -  so I got paid too!  That led to my first full time project, an extension of what I started originally, and that's the whole ecosystem of multi physics simulation tools based on MATLAB.

I spent two years at Dyson, and when I’d completed a whole ecosystem there was not much more I could do, from a multi physics simulation point of view. Very few interns can say that that projects were used that way. I think out of the cohort of 60, probably less than 10, had a long-lasting impact from their project, I was very lucky that it worked out.

How easy/hard is it for students to find internships now?

It is slightly harder because there is still a backlog of graduates since COVID, but gradually the industry is slowly absorbing it. Quite often you have more experienced engineers mentoring the graduates and then you have the graduates mentoring the interns. So if you don't have graduates, you can’t have interns.

In my company right now, we're ramping up the whole internship scheme as are many other engineering firms.

Please tell us what you do now

I left Dyson in 2021 to look for a bigger system to simulate. I am now a Senior Mission Systems Engineer at Eutelsat OneWeb, a GEO-LEO satellite operator. In a nutshell, it’s my job to solve real problems, not only simulations. Imagine broadband beaming down from a satellite. Is it doing its job or not? Quite a lot of the time it is not, so we have to figure out what bugs are in the system by doing tests and trying different configurations.

The company I work for had gone through a difficult patch a few years ago so there was no written documentation, no playbook sitting there available for you. So that really helped me grow in terms of learning things on the fly - there's no technical mentor who can give me the answer because nobody knows. So that was a great opportunity for me to grow!

As a result, I'm now moving over to a new role, system architect, to implement what I have learned. This includes how to operate the system, how to modify the system, how to fix the system and help coordinate all of our engineering development effort.

It is possible to find these kinds of opportunities if you look at the right place. Instead of joining a traditional, stable, well-established company, I took a bit of leap of faith and it worked out.

What's your experience of being a woman in an engineering environment? Are women well represented?

No, definitely not, which is why I put in the effort to make sure there's good representation both at Dyson and my current job. I'm in working groups to better define how we can have various groups better represented - not only women, but any other group that is not white male, because engineering is still very much dominated by that.

Student body demographics do not translate to the workforce. There are various reasons, but that's why I'm the only one still in engineering from the original group at Dyson – the rest of them are not in engineering at all. I feel that urge to demonstrate that women in engineering can work out. We bring a different perspective – not only from soft skills in terms of empathy or whatnot, but literally just approaching the problems slightly differently.

There are certain big name companies that work really hard to support these initiatives. You will see them as sponsors of International Women in Engineering events.

Senior leadership is still white male in general, probably like 80 to 90% of the time, but more and more people in middle management now see the benefits women in engineering could bring to the general workforce. Some will quietly help you and others will be more vocal but I won't say there's a company that's 100% representing the demographics perfectly. As a woman, you have to be loud and present yourself, present your work and don't shy away.

How would you go about finding a mentor?

Despite there being very few senior female mentors, I would make an active effort to speak to them, even if we don't have any project crossing over.

For the last few years I've been speaking to a few who are basically pioneers of the whole industry. 30 years ago, when they started out, everyone had to wear a suit. I spoke to them to get their thoughts on various ideas about how to better present myself.

I act as a mid-career mentor for young engineers as well as graduates who are not sure what to do. Also, if I’m at a technical meeting I will interrupt to encourage the other managers to invite the female engineers with good ideas speak up. It's important to pass it down the line. 

Mentors can't help all of the female engineers in the population, so it's really down to everyone trying to pass it forward and help the next generation. We need to make it very clear to the junior engineers, actually both male and female, that they can ask questions.

What sort of future technology do you see emerging in the industry for satellites?

If you cannot control your satellite anymore it's just a loose cannon flying in space.

There are a few companies now working on ‘in orbit servicing’, so instead of leaving broken satellites in space, trying to bring them down to Earth and burn them, they send a new robot into orbit to do repairs and servicing. Others send a robot up there, grab the broken satellite, catch it, and then bring it down safely.

This is an emerging technology, currently quite a lot of them are popping up as startups and there is funding from the European Space Agency. So, this is definitely important for space industry in general, not only communication satellites, but all satellites - weather observation satellites, military usage, whatever satellite it is, they will all fail one day.

This industry has been irresponsible for 30 years now, no one thought about the implications when satellites were no longer launched just for scientific exploration but also for commercial use. It's time for this new branch of space ecosystem to grow. There's a lot of funding involved. I think people are generally excited with that.

Outer space is not like Civil Aviation space where things are still controlled by each nation.  In terms of physical space (your altitude away from Earth) and your communication space (the frequency of the radio wave you use) both of them are getting congested - and it's now catching up with us.

Would you like to go to space?
 

Given the amount of space junk I know about, and how often we have to just move things around to avoid a collision - probably no! Even at the International Space Station altitude, things are not that safe… but I might like to take a flight very close to the edge.

Is sustainability a consideration for satellite companies?

Their first priority is building the right equipment that will last the mission lifetime (where the satellite in space is providing service that you can cash in on) – so they want to make sure it is reliable in the first place.

A secondary backup unit might be used, if it doesn’t add too much weight – but this means adding more fuel which is very expensive.

Space hardware could live longer and provide a longer effective mission - that bit make sense to the business. Over the last 30 years, the industry has got really good at developing space grade components that are tested for certain levels of radiation to sustain performance in space for however many years required in the mission.

However, as we mentioned earlier, projects companies tend to only care about the mission bit. Historically people did not put in too much effort about end of life deorbiting. You've done your best to extend your mission life of something from 10 years to 15 years to 20 years. Great but what do you do after those 20 years?

Historically, geostationary satellites (the ones that are stationary relative to where you are on Earth) orbit at a very specific altitude away from Earth, so when they are no longer useful, they just nudge them out a bit more into what's called ‘graveyard orbit’ leaving space for new satellites to replace them – this worked well for 30 years.

Satellites in Low Earth orbit, such as Starlink and my company, are making headline news because now we are starting to crowd up the bit just outside of Earth. Instead of just a ring around the Earth, there is now a whole network, so that's making things harder to navigate.

So, for satellites in Low Earth orbit, we need to design something that we can bring down through the atmosphere when we no longer need it, where it will burn up.

There are stories of some scientific space mission equipment coming back down to Earth, but certain parts not burning up as they are very temperature resistant. Most of the time they will land somewhere in the ocean. There are, however, occasional stories of big pieces of metal coming down onto houses, and people trying to sue NASA!

Operators who own satellites need to justify the probability of such large pieces coming back down on Earth and hitting someone. Ideally, all satellites should be capable of burning up completely as they come down.

Geostationary satellites are all state-of-the-art handcrafted machines, engineers make sure they are perfect before launch, but they are getting out of date and are no longer in fashion. Today businesses just want Low Earth Orbit satellites, built quickly and cheaply. Now that comes with quality issue, so inevitably the more you mass produce satellites, the worse they get. And that's true in all engineering items, not just satellites. You get the same of cars, you get the same with mobile phones, you get the same with everything. So that's now affecting us.

There are already quite a lot of out-of-date satellites in the Low Earth Orbit across multiple operators. These are the ones that are causing risk to others because we can't control them effectively. So that's why we need this whole new industry of in-orbit servicing or deorbit assist where they can fly a new robot satellite up there, grab it, take it and bring it down with it.

So ideally we want a satellite to be self-sufficient at de-orbiting itself. But when you mass produce, you just can't guarantee 100% of them will last that long and do the right thing there is a small fraction that needs assistance. How do you make sure all these 200- 300 scattered objects can be brought down safely? That's the bit where, as an industry, we don't have a good solution yet.

What about re-usable satellite equipment?

SpaceX is becoming really good at it, partly for sustainability reasons, partly for profit. The more they can re-use, the more profitable things are. They're definitely driven by profit, which helps because in the launch industry fuel and fairings (the outer casing) are significant costs.

Now there are more and more companies trying to replicate that formula. I think that's a good thing, because by avoiding a monopoly and having more companies competing, we get better at doing these. Ultimately this is the one thing where cost is aligned with their sustainability agenda.

The cost of building and launching satellites is not necessarily aligned with sustainability. Business don't want to add an extra component (to make it easier to grab the satellite and bring it down) as it will make the satellite heavier and cost them more to launch. In their view the extra weight serves absolutely zero purpose throughout its operational lifetime - it's not producing anything that you can cash in.

Are there satellite regulations?

Yes, there are, but not strictly enforced and it's very hard to quantify and
confirm a satellite is not manoeuvrable, you can't control all of the companies. People should be declaring it to the relevant bodies but we do not have one standardised regulation body, we have multiple.

Every country has their own regulation body, so things get very muddy. They all have slightly different rules, slightly different interpretation. And, at the end of the day, the same satellite flies through regions and serve all of the countries so when this satellite fails one day in the future whose job it is to ensure it comes down safely?

It's different from, let's say, oil dredging. If something goes wrong in the North Sea, there's an area where one country issued the permit (either the UK or Norway) then if something goes wrong with that oil rig, that specific government can penalise the operator for causing damage. But this is not the case for space.

Finally, what single piece of advice would you give to young aspiring engineers who want to get into the aerospace or a satellite industry?

It's not the fastest moving industry, so you have to be patient. Learning about this industry is not that easy as there's not a lot of information out there available.

At uni, you have the opportunity to try something common and not as specialised as the ‘space industry’, like learning a new coding language, or how to programme a micro computer. That's something you can very easily get into by watching YouTube or watching a free online course. The more skills you have, the more you can offer, then when the opportunity comes, you need to be ready to grab onto it.