2018 marks the year of engineering and Hilson Moran want to inspire a broader and more diverse range of talented designers into the industry. As part of this, we’ve partnered with the Girls Day School Trust to host a number of initiatives all designed to help attract more female design engineers and consultants into our sector.
To kick things off, last week the Hilson Moran London office welcomed a group of amazing and talented students from across the Girls Day School Trusts’ (GDST) network to spend a day with our teams. The days programme was designed to give them all an insightful and engaging look into the day to day running of a design consultancy to broaden their perspective on what a typical engineering role might look like… It’s not all hard hats, high viz vests and steel toe cap boots.
The day started with a brief overview of Hilson Moran, with a look at what we do, then the students were then shown some our work done on their school buildings as part of involvement on the GDST Framework. This was then followed up by first hand experiences from design consultants Allison Jones, Scarlett Franklin and Marie-Louise Schembri, who all shared their own personal experiences of the industry and how they got into the field of design which highlighted just how wide the range of career pathways actually is.
The girls were then take on a tour around the office to shadow some of our specialist groups including the MEP, Acoustics, Smart Buildings and Sustainability team who gave them a first hand look into the varied aspects of building services design. The tours included presentations of the acoustics technology applied to buildings like Regents Crescent which uses springs to decouple the building and reduce underground vibrations caused by tube lines. The sustainability team also shared the concepts behind 30 St Mary Axe (The Gherkin) and the innovative CFD and AR technology they used.
To give the students the opportunity asks any questions missed across the morning, staff were then invited to join them for a networking lunch which was enjoyed by all.
