Interview with Cheryl Anderson, Materials Engineer

1) How would you describe Materials Engineering to someone who knows nothing about it?

Materials Engineering is all about understanding what things around us of are made of and how we can produce things out of different materials so that they have different properties. Materials Engineering can involve working on things in a very theoretical way, for example, carrying out tests to see how strong a material is in a laboratory. However, it can also be very practical, for example, working in a huge production plant manufacturing materials from raw products.

Materials Engineering also takes you from the very small, such as nano-technology, to the very big, such as producing thousands of tons of iron a week in a blast furnace. It is a very broad field – once you have studied the fundamental theory there are lots of different possibilities in terms of a career.

2) What is your normal day on the job like?

My current job involves working with the customers of a steel producer to understand why different material properties are important to them. Sometimes this means I am looking at tables of data or reading reports about how different manufacturing processes work. But much more I am involved in actually going out and meeting the customers and looking at their production facilities so that I can really understand how they use the steel that we make. For example, last week I visited a factory in Italy and in a few weeks I will be travelling to Eastern Europe. I also go to quite a lot of meetings, some only a few minutes long and some that are quite a lot longer, sometimes days!

To give you an idea of my week I have listed some of things that I was doing last week below:

• Monday – Write a report about a meeting that I had with a customer and prepare a presentation for the management team about how the visit went.

• Tuesday – Joint meeting with some other departments to discuss how we can improve the way in which we make our products. • Wednesday – Research on the internet about how certain materials are being used by some of our customers.

• Thursday – Travel to Italy, some meetings with the customer, a tour of their site and discussion about some technical issues that we are both interested in.

• Friday – more meetings with the customer; travel back to the UK – got back quite late! 3) Do you work with several other people or mainly by yourself? My job varies a lot in this respect. I would say that roughly 70% of it is with other people and about 30% working by myself.

4) What would you say is the average starting salary for a Materials Engineer?

This is bit difficult to define because it really depends on the type of job that you go for when you finish studying and how much studying you have done. For a graduate with a BEng degree in Materials Science and Engineering starting with Corus (the company that I work for) I think that the starting salary is about £18,000 -20,000. For some companies it might be a bit more. If you study for longer, for example to do some research at university the salary is normally higher.

5) Do you enjoy being a materials engineer?

Absolutely! It sounds cheesy, but I am always glad that I decided to study Materials Engineering. As I said before it is such a broad field that you can go in dozens of directions and I have had a few different jobs in Materials since I left university.

6) Are there any specific courses in high school or college you would specifically recommend?

There are several courses at A-Level or Advanced GNVQ that can lead on to a Materials Engineering career. I studied Chemistry, Physics and Maths, which sometimes sounds quite heavy but they all complemented each other really well and made the first years of the university course much easier! However, I had friends that had studied economics, biology, geology and design technology. I think that it is necessary to study two out of three of the A-level that I did though, in order to have a good grounding in the science of materials at a fundamental level.

7) What are your normal work hours?

My normal hours are 8:30 am to 4:30pm. Sometimes when I am travelling I work a little outside this but it is worth it to see the different cities around the world!

8) Are there a lot of job openings for materials engineers?

Overall I think that there are lots of opportunities. When I have tried to find Materials Engineers for certain jobs in our company in the past I have often found that there are not enough to go around! And that is Europe wide, no just in the UK.

The magazine that I get every month from The Materials Institute (the professional organisation that lots of Materials Engineers belong to) always has several jobs listed. Also, lots of companies take on new graduates for their graduate training schemes e.g. Corus, Rolls Royce, the government. Most university and college departments have close links with companies and can help people find jobs when they are finishing with their studies.

9) What types of projects have you worked on?

Lots! After university I spent some time working on a research project, looking at how the properties of steel change when you weld them. This involved lots of experiments and analysis of the results. It was quite a long project (three years) but the number of people involved was quite small.

I have also worked on some much larger projects where more than one company was involved and we were developing new materials. In one project I had to carry out experiments but this time they were actually based on a steel plant and I was using 20 tons of steel per experiment! I had to write reports and run lots of meetings to discuss the results. This project was bigger in terms of the number of people involved but shorter in terms of time.

10) How much after-college training did you need for your job?

As I said above, after school I studied Materials Science and Engineering at Swansea University to get a BEng (Bachelors of Engineering) degree. After this, I was interested in doing some research but was also keen to start getting experience in industry so I spent four years working in a steel works, doing research into the metallurgy of welded steels. This led to a qualification know as an EngD (Engineering Doctorate). In total this was seven years in university but please don’t be put off by this!

I had a great time as a student and the last four years were like having a job and you get tax free money from the government to do it. It is not necessary to spend this long studying but in the end I think that it gave me a better start in Materials Engineering and it was lots of fun to do!