The Future Engineers Series: Women in Engineering Pt III

Hello and welcome to the third blog in our Future Engineers Series — Women in Engineering. Here we meet Maisie Gleeson, a Graduate Fire Engineer at OFR in Bath who tells us about when she realised fire engineering was the career choice for her. 

“I’ll admit, I hadn’t heard of fire engineering — it wasn’t until I met OFR representatives at a graduate fair in my fourth year that I had my head turned. With that I’ll start by recommending that any budding fire engineers at uni right now come and meet our colleagues at the fairs we’re attending in the coming weeks!

“I honestly made the right choice and am enjoying my work so much. I always wanted a technical career and had initially decided on building services, but fire engineering is richly diverse and I’m doing something different each day.

“I hadn’t worried about being a young woman in this role either; there was a reasonable number of girls on my university course, and of course now at OFR where we have a very fairly balanced, equal culture. There’s no way that being a woman impacts my experiences in this company.

“With that I’d say that it’s important to really explore the company you work for in this field to ensure that you can progress and your employer will listen to you and invest in you — OFR certainly do that with me.

“I’m given the chance to prove myself on key projects like the National Rail Museum as part of the Vision 2025 project in which new museums are being built in regeneration areas. It means we need to bring in more technical expertise which I love doing.”