Beth Corrigan

"My work requires having a good attention to detail to spot issues, making sure regulations are being met and problem solving. Alongside this, it involves working closely with lots of different people and being able to work well in a team. The people I work with can have little knowledge or vast experience of fire engineering and therefore I need to be able to adapt when communicating my ideas so that I can be understood. My personality types suit this role well by being a Quality Controller who likes to check that details are correct and is good at spotting errors, a Communicator who is good with words and people and is good at simplifying complex information and explaining facts in documents and a Coordinator with good attention to detail and good at communicating to understand what the client or customer wants."

"I develop fire safety strategies for new buildings. The fire strategy takes into account aspects including means of escape, internal and external fire spread, fire fighting provisions and fire protection systems. The development of the fire strategy requires site visits and report writing. The most exciting part of my career to date is seeing one of the first projects I worked on be constructed. In my second week I worked on a fire strategy for a large secondary school which opened a few weeks ago. It's so fulfilling that my job involves a real life construction, even if it takes a couple of years to materialise. Within our company there are opportunities to progress either in management or a technical route. I personally would like to stay in a more technical role and hope to become a technical expert. My opportunity to travel abroad is dependent on the projects I work on. One of my colleagues had the opportunity to travel to Dubai last year and one was able to go to Bahrain. I have had the opportunity to travel within the UK and hope to get the opportunity to travel abroad in the future. We get the opportunity to visit a lot of different types of sites which is brilliant. Some examples of a site visit could be to the hangar site within an airport, an aquifer site (underground water storage and recovery) or a cinema site. "

"At school I enjoyed both arts and science subjects, so it was difficult to know exactly what route to take. I was always interested in how things worked and solving problems, so for me going into engineering seemed to be the best choice. I left school a year earlier than usual to study Aeronautical Engineering at Glasgow University. Once I graduated I decided to take a year to do some travelling and look for graduate jobs. I was excited to discover that fire engineering consultancies would consider those with aeronautical backgrounds. I applied for Mott MacDonald and was successful. My parents have been the biggest inspiration in my life. They always encouraged my brother, sister and I, to do exactly what we wanted to do as long as we were able to support ourselves comfortably. We were not brought up with gender biases. I had a dolls’ house where I spent hours creating stories and the next day I would be outside working on a go-kart with my Dad. I am now a Fire Engineer, my brother is a journalist and my sister is a Music Therapist, so we really have gone in different directions but always with support from my parents and each other. My Dad (now retired) was a dedicated mechanical engineer always striving for safety and to use his role in engineering to make a difference. This made engineering appealing to me from a young age."

"I love music so in my free time I like to go to concerts, sing and play piano. It's great to come home after a long day at work and relax and unwind at the keyboard. I also like to go to exercise classes at the gym to keep fit and I played netball with some other women from my company for a few months which was brilliant. As I've only lived in London a few years, I try and do at least one thing new every weekend to make sure I make the most of living in such an amazing city."

"A typical day at work involves speaking with a number of different people and answering fire engineering queries by email. At the start of a project, I will review drawings and mark them up with fire comments to send back to the design team. Towards the end of a project, the majority of my time will be spent report writing. I enjoy the variety. Every day is different and I'm always learning something new. Fire engineering produces a wide range of queries and I will always come across something I haven't seen before. I have worked on a wide range of projects since I started and in my first 6 months of the job I worked on an aircraft hangar, a velodrome, a school and a large shopping mall. The nature of our work is such that we don't work on one single project for months at a time and this creates more variety."

"Secondary education (GCSE/O-Levels) Undergraduate degree (BSc, BA, etc.) \tPost-graduate degree (MSc, MA, etc.) Aeronautical Engineering MEng"