MATT

What first made you think "I want to get into engineering"?

I always loved going into my grandfather’s garage and helping to design and make his latest project when I was little. Away from there I’d spend hours building with Lego, or taking things apart and reassembling them - with mixed success. As a teenager, a university open day showed me that, through engineering, I could use the science and maths I enjoyed whilst also getting hands-on solving real, tangible problems. I loved that I could combine understanding how things worked with the creation of something useful – it was a clear choice of university course from there.

 

Tell us about life before Dyson.

I completed a summer placement between my third and fourth years of university, embedded within Dyson’s Digital Motors team. My job was to help build a prototype run of around 1000 high-speed motors and evaluate the production process. A summer spent working amongst some incredibly talented engineers and seeing the kinds of technology they were developing had me convinced I’d like to come back after graduation; luckily they were willing to have me!

 

What do you do, day to day?

I work on motors, mechanical systems and electromagnetics. My job varies throughout the stages of a project. Some days, it’s performing calculations, modeling the physics of a system or setting up computer simulations; others, I can be designing the solid parts on a CAD computer, creating engineering drawings, or testing the performance of my prototypes. It’s hugely varied and I’ve ended up working on systems I never expected to help design when I joined Dyson.

 

What would you say to aspiring engineers?

Try to get involved with lots of aspects of engineering. Work hard on science and maths – there’s no substitute for understanding those – but make sure you understand how objects are made, too. Build things yourself, test them, figure out how and why they fail (which they sometimes will). My last manager liked to say “if you’ve never made a mistake, you’ve never made anything.”