Profile

My taste in music is quite varied, but my favourite genres are probably EDM, drum and bass, and the many varieties of metal. Some favourite artists of mine include Polaris, Currents, and Graphic Nature, all of which I have been fortunate enough to see live at least once.

I have been playing the electric guitar on-and-off for nearly 20 years and if it has taught me anything it is that learning and practice is lifelong, you will never feel like you have mastered it! I have one acoustic guitar, two 6-string electric guitars and one 7-string electric guitar. Having these is useful for being able to play in a wider variety of tunings, I still always feel like I need more of them though…

Occasionally, I like to do DIY projects around the house. For example I installed storage drawers in the void under the stairs, built (and later modified) a pergola in my back garden, and boarded out part of my loft. When I do these projects, I normally plan everything in Sketchup, which is immensely helpful for me to know up front what materials I will need and how I will build what I want to build with minimal waste. My in-laws were very impressed with the pergola project being complete in 3 days with almost zero waste.

One of the best things about a career in civil engineering is the satisfaction of knowing that the work you do contributes to improving and sustaining the lives of thousands of people every single day. Our society and economy rely on increasingly complex and heavily demanded infrastructure to function, and civil engineers are some of the most important professionals involved in building and maintaining that infrastructure.

Even maintaining existing infrastructure requires a great deal of skill and diligence to make sure that problems are dealt with, workers are not put in danger, money is spent efficiently, and the environment is not unduly impacted. On highway maintenance projects for example, a great deal of work can go into surveying the condition of existing infrastructure, locating overhead and buried utilities (cables, pipes etc), and projecting the cost of the project not just up to the point of construction but over the whole lifetime of the asset.

Sometimes my work involves going and visiting sites to gather information that is needed to inform the designs we are working on, such as pictures of the condition of areas that need to be fixed and measurements between important features that need to be worked around. As a manager, I also need to make sure that my team have the right amount of work and protect their safety and welfare.