• Question: How did you decide your career path?

    Asked by maria to Aisling, Colin, Laurence, Ned, Niamh on 2 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Aisling Shannon

      Aisling Shannon answered on 2 Mar 2016:

      For me, one thing lead to another. I never decided that I wanted to be a Spacecraft Structures Engineer working at ESA. My thesis at university lead to my first job, the things I learned in the first job lead to the second job and it kind of grew from there. For some people they have a target and they work really hard to get there, for me, I enjoyed what I was doing and changed jobs a few times to really get it perfect – and here I am!!

    • Photo: Ned Dwyer

      Ned Dwyer answered on 2 Mar 2016:

      I was good at maths and science subjects at school and at teh time I wanted to study somethinng at university that had a good chance of leading to a job. So I choose engineering, even though at teh time I did not really know what it involved. At university it is a tough enough course, lots of subjects to study, but I worked hard and got a good degree and then one thing led to another in terms ofthe work I did afterwards

    • Photo: Laurence O'Rourke

      Laurence O'Rourke answered on 2 Mar 2016:

      Good question. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I came out of secondary school but I chose Science because it seemed the most interesting for me. It was really only after my masters degree in microelectronics when I started working in Holland as a young graduate that I became fascinated with all space engineering things and I decided to follow that since then.

    • Photo: Niamh Shaw

      Niamh Shaw answered on 4 Mar 2016:

      Well, I think your career kind of creates itself if you keep pursuing things that interest you. Ideally I’m striving to become a master of the things I’m most passionate about. And I’ve been passionate about a number of things for many years. So I guess I just started with the first thing I liked doing on my list, which was Maths and science subjects. And then I took time to learn more about performing and then after training in number of areas I was finally ready to merge to 2 and begin to master the career I really wanted, which is the path I’m on now. Its rare that you will find one course that will match exactly what you want to do wit your life, so always keep an eye out for other courses that you’re also interested in. And so the career that you really want will begin to build itself, who you keep an eye on the bigger picture.

    • Photo: Colin Shirran

      Colin Shirran answered on 8 Mar 2016:

      I didn’t really decide my career path, it all just kind of fell into place one after the other as the opportunities opened up to me. Originally I wanted to be a pilot and was hoping to try and get accepted to the Irish Air Corps since it costs a lot of money to do it by yourself. They weren’t recruiting at the time so I decided to go to college and improve my knowledge on aircraft by doing a course in Aircraft Systems. During this time I fell in love with the design side of it and my eye sight began to get worse. Since the air corps has a higher eyesight requirement I decided to forget that side of things, continue with design and get a private pilots licence later on in life. After, that I got into my masters course at Cranfield through a link between them and my college in Ireland. I saw that they had a course in Astronautics, which I always had an interest in, so I applied for that and eventually found myself in the job I’m in now.

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