Profile

I was born in Japan and moved to the UK when I was 4 years old with my mum. I grew up near Portsmouth in the South coast and loved it there. My favourite memories are spending time in the sunshine, at the beach with BBQs. For university I moved to Edinburgh, and completely fell in love, which is why I still live here.

I loved studying maths at school. I didn’t particularly enjoy sciences at school, but began to enjoy them once I started revising for my GCSE’s. At college, I studied maths, chemistry and biology but had no idea what to do as a career/at university. Thankfully, my tutor and parents suggested chemical engineering and the rest is history (I hadn’t even heard of chemical engineering before applying).

I love working in the energy industry, I really feel like the work that I do day-to-day makes a big impact.

I work specifically in oil & gas and hydrogen, although my company work with all types of energy including wind, solar, tidal.

I am in the Process & Facilities team, we are the dreamers – using our collective skills and experience to generate and develop ideas and concepts and then work out how to turn them into reality.

Take energy for example, you take the raw material such as oil from the ground and pass that through a bunch of pipes and equipment, to get the final product. But each process has its own challenges/difficulties that you must design for. It’s about being a problem-solver, creating products in the cheapest, and most efficient way possible.

I work in both Edinburgh and Glasgow, but also sometimes from home too. Each morning depends on where I am working, but will typically walk (or train) to the office for around 8.30am, and settle in with my morning tea and check my emails and plan the day.

Today, for example, I got into work and caught up on my emails (I had a long weekend last week, so had to catch up a bit). I read some documents sent by a client, as I am starting a new project so there is a lot of existing data to review. The client had sent a simulation of the plant, which takes oil offshore and processes it to be exported back to shore, so I had to analyse that. I then had an internal meeting with some of my project team. I took about 45 minutes for lunch, getting a Tesco meal deal and going for a quick walk. Then in the afternoon, I continued reviewing documents as well as taking part in a Women in Engineering meeting that was set up by my company. Tomorrow will likely have different tasks involved too.

I usually finish around 5.30 and a bit earlier on the weekend!