When we look back at why and how we decided to embark on a specific career path, most of us will have a teacher or a mentor in mind who helped spark our passion for engineering and architecture.
Alison Wallis, Associate, is heavily involved with internal training at SD. She runs our IStructE mentoring scheme – providing engineers with the support they need to complete their portfolio and hosts practice paper sessions to guide them through to chartership.
Throughout 2022 Alison did a fair amount of mentoring the next generation of architects and engineers outside of SD too.
She took part in Future Day at her daughter’s school, Wren Academy in Finchley. It was a speed networking opportunity for the Year 9’s to learn about a variety of careers from visiting parents. Although they have a while before deciding on a career path, the hope is to give them a good insight and help steer them in the years ahead.
She visited the London Metropolitan University and University of Cambridge where she provided architecture students with structural tutorials on their end-of-year projects, offering guidance to help inform their designs.
Alison also ran two sessions for Year 1 classes at Hackney New Primary School as part of the World of Work programme run by Inspire Education Business Partnership. She covered the basics of engineering and hosted a tower building exercise where she explained how the children could make their creations as stable as possible.
And in the Summer of 2022 she joined Forging Links, Fuse Architects, Graphic Structures, Calford Seaden, and Claritas Group at the Charter School North Dulwich to take part in their annual careers fair. The aim was to inspire the next generation into a career within the built environment.