WOMEN IN ENGINEERING DAY

“To celebrate International Women in Engineering Day, Sunbury Manor School were invited to take a group of Year 8 students to BP. We had 2 guest speakers who told us about their careers with BP, explaining that although they had worked with them for so long, they had many different roles in different parts of the world, as BP are an excellent company for promoting continuing professional development. They also told us that as well as continuing to provide oil and gas world-wide, they are exploring the idea of using our household waste as a fuel.

We had an opportunity to network with seven different female BP engineers who enthused about their jobs as civil, chemical, broadcasting, construction, and airplane engineers – there is even an engineer who works with the different fragrances used by LUSH!

The main activity was to build an oilrig from marshmallows and straws, with each building item having a price tag of £1,000,000. We had to make it a certain height, think about our budget and see how much weight it could bear before it collapsed – some were collapsing even before we added weights!

Finally, during our lunch break, we got the chance to study engineers from the past and learn about the way they changed the world with their work and inventions through a quiz and dressing up!  We discovered Margaret Rousseau who found out that cantaloupe melons help produce penicillin and Stephanie Kwolek who invented Kevlar which is 5 times stronger than steel.”