Question: how did you get to work at the esa

Aisling Shannon answered on 1 Mar 2016:

When I was in UL my final year thesis for my degree was using a program for Structural Analysis, called NASTRAN. Normally undergraduates didn’t get access to that program as the licence was 30000 Irish pounds a year at the time… So I had something on my CV that other people didn’t. I applied for lots of jobs in England (and Ireland but most of what was available in Ireland at the time was Aircraft Maintenance) and got offered a job with a company called GKN as a Aircraft Structural Engineer. For their graduate program, they gave you four 6 month placements with different groups within the Structures team. One of those placements was with the Dynamics group, which is not very widely used for Aircraft – but very relevant for Spacecraft (I can explain that separately if you like), so after working at GKN for 2.5 years, I moved to a job at Astrium (now Airbus) doing Spacecraft Structural Engineering. From there I gained several years experience both at Astrium and SSTL (both in England) before I applied for the job at ESA. Having done lots of different things in my career to that stage, I think made me stand out a bit, and I got the job 🙂