Intelligent Data Centres Issue 18 | Page 21

INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE POWERED BY THE DCA INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE POWERED BY THE DCA The data centre industry and me – Choosing a career in data centres The DCA’s role is to work with the data centre sector, supporting key areas of concern for the industry. New talent entering the industry is consistently raised by the DCA community. In this piece, we hear from Beth Whitehead, Associate Sustainability Engineer at Operational Intelligence, about her journey into the industry. My route into the data centre industry was not a direct one, but rather one of serendipity. I grew up in the countryside between Reading and Henley and attended a local primary school and comprehensive. I studied for my A-levels in Maths, Physics and Chemistry at a tertiary college in Henley. I had always loved Maths and Physics, and spent my childhood playing with Lego. Two key factors led me into engineering: the first was a week-long course aimed at getting girls interested in engineering; the second was my physics teacher who told my parents engineering was not a career for girls. After that, my mind was made up. To those that think sexism doesn’t exist in the 20th century, you are far wrong. The problem is it is so ingrained in our subconscious that we don’t even realise we have been conditioned. There is a wealth of evidence to show that by the age of five, the careers available to a gender (male or female) are greatly reduced because of how they are portrayed within society – children’s books show builders as men and teachers as women. In addition, our focus on girls is how they should be kind and caring and we praise them to death. Once the praise is removed, girls begin to believe they are inherently bad unless told otherwise and in comes the imposter phenomenon. A few of us slip through the net, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t subjected to the same conditioning. However, I digress. After completing my A-levels I went to Cardiff University where I got a first-class degree in civil engineering with an MEng in design and management. During my degree, I did a number of summer placements to meet the financial shortfall created by the abolition of grants and introduction of tuition fees, and of course to gain experience. In my third year, I completed a sandwich year with Arup as a structural engineer and suddenly the rest of my degree became a lot easier. Learning really does need both theoretical and practical elements to be effective. I will never forget the first time I went on site and saw the reinforcement mesh for a slab set out. I was truly baffled. What on earth was it? I had only ever drawn neat sections through beams with circles for the rebar. I had never thought about what this actually translated to in the physical world. Once I’d joined these dots, it all made so much more sense. After my placement, Arup sponsored me for the final years of my degree and when I graduated in 2003, I started as a graduate www.intelligentdatacentres.com Issue 18 21