Question: what got you into science and space?

Abbie Hutty answered on 27 Feb 2020:

My route was that my teachers suggested it to me when I was doing my GCSEs and didn’t know what I wanted to do as a career, as they knew I liked making things. But I didn’t really know what engineering was and like a lot of people I confused it with “Mechanic” and thought I’d be fixing broken washing machines and things and didn’t know why they thought that sounded like something I’d enjoy. Then I saw a thing on the news about a mission to send a probe to Mars – called Beagle II, and heard that British Engineers were working on it. And I thought ok, perhaps I don’t know what engineering is, as designing missions to Mars sounds pretty cool actually.

So I decided to go to University and study Mechanical Engineering, and whenever I got the opportunity to make decisions about which modules to study in my course, I picked ones related to robotics, and space, and then I managed to get an industrial placement year working for a company that makes satellites, and carried on working for them in my holidays after that, and did my masters thesis with them, and then I applied for a job here at Airbus on the graduate scheme. Then there was a job that came up to work on the Rover structure and I put my name forward and I got it!

So I basically went full circle from seeing a Mars mission in the news and it inspiring me to join engineering, and now I am sometimes the person on the news talking about my Mars mission and hoping that someone out there might be listening and be inspired by this mission!