• Question: Have any of your ancestors or people recognised within your culture or who have been a part of your country's history inspired you to take up engineering?

    Asked by Sim to Dawn, James, Sarah, Sylvain, Tomas, Vaanu on 14 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Sylvain Jamais

      Sylvain Jamais answered on 14 Nov 2016:


      Not that I know of

    • Photo: Dawn Gillies

      Dawn Gillies answered on 14 Nov 2016:


      I’m the first engineer in my family! My teachers inspired me to become an engineer. I didn’t really know what an engineer was until I started studying it at university, my teachers had all told me that I would enjoy it though…. They were right.

      I had amazing physics and chemistry teachers in high school who made every lesson fun! In Scotland we have a lot of very famous Engineers to look up to – James Watt, Alexander Graham Bell, and John Logie Baird are just a few.

    • Photo: Sarah Hampson

      Sarah Hampson answered on 14 Nov 2016:


      It was my dad and one of my university professors who inspired me to take up engineering, so not really ‘ancestors’…
      But there is a woman from the Philippines (my mum’s country) who I heard about during my job, who inspires me a lot today: Fe del Mundo. She cared deeply about the healthcare of the poor people in her country. She treated thousands of them, and invented a cheap incubator (a machine for looking after sick babies) for them that didn’t need electricity.
      She was also the first ever woman to study at Harvard Medical School, in 1936.

    • Photo: Vaanathi Sundaresan

      Vaanathi Sundaresan answered on 15 Nov 2016:


      My uncle is an mechanical engineer. I did not get my inspiration from him exactly but it has always made me wonder how it would be to be an engineer. But I got interested in Electrical engineering instead. I am the first biomedical Engineer in my family

    • Photo: Tomas Parrado

      Tomas Parrado answered on 16 Nov 2016:


      Not as far as I know. I’ll have to ask my grandad to see if he knows of any…

    • Photo: James Clarke

      James Clarke answered on 16 Nov 2016:


      Not anyone in particular, I don’t think I’d learnt a lot about the history of engineering by the time I decided to start studying it, which is a huge shame – it’s so interesting!

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