Working with friends

Hi. My name's Matt, and I'm a systems engineer who designs submarines. I also have a side project called The3Engineers, where I help write a series of children's books to help educate children about the environment.

I got started in engineering back in when I was in college. I did A-levels in maths, physics and PE. My highest score school was in PE, but my maths lecturer suggested that a career in engineering and I didn't know what that was at the time. Being 17, I wasn't aware of what engineering was - I got to learn a little bit more about it. Then I had a friend who suggested that I went to university and studied.

So I started a BSc in engineering at Exeter University. As I developed, I upgraded that to a BEng,

and finally to an MEng master's degree where I qualified as an engineer.

What I love most about my job designing submarines is all the interesting people I get to meet. I get to work with various types of engineers and other people in other functions, and learn a lot of information and knowledge from a varied set of experienced people.

The3Engineers project was interesting because we got to transfer our engineering skills to something

completely different. Imagine three engineers trying to write a children's book. It sort of is unheard of and notoriously engineers are into maths, and not into English! We had to use our transferable skills and creativity to actually design a set of books, from the ground up. We used lots of the systems engineering tool-set and processes to be able to do that.

What I love is getting to work with my friends every day and being unconstrained by what we're doing. We get to do what we enjoy and we get to have a laugh at the same time.

The advice I'd give anyone that's looking for a creative career in engineering would be to not give up and to always look for opportunities and be open to new things. Engineering such a wide discipline from space to the nuclear, to defense to renewables. It's crazy, so just be open to it and really enjoy learning.