“Engineers affect our lives daily by designing the world around us”. This is the first thing we learned when Sonia Jafari, a second-year Engineering student and Westlake graduate, and Kelly Moodie from Women in Engineering Network (WEN) came in to speak to a packed classroom of keen students. Sonia gave us an overview of what it’s like to study Engineering at Auckland University. It was interesting to hear that a broad range of Engineering specialisations is offered in the first year to help students choose their own specialisation – Structural Engineering in Sonia’s case. Kelly built on Sonia’s presentation with information about the wonderful support and mentoring that WEN offers to female engineering students.

We were also privileged to hear from two fourth-year Massey students specialising in Robotic and Mechatronics. Jonathan Brown and Ben Chapelow were great advocates for this area of Engineering and have loved the hands-on opportunities they’ve had at Massey, including building robotic dogs and remote air-monitoring and storm water systems. They really emphasised the flexibility of their specialisation, which has provided them with a broad knowledge base that could take them from biomedical engineering to aeronautics. The sky’s the limit!

Siobhan McKimmey