Egg

I have decided that i'm not going to be an engineer.

To be honest, i decided this years and years ago - i didn't really need to spend two days this week at the Bromley Education Development Centre doing engineering workshops and being talked at by engineers to know this. But whatever - i missed two days of school!

So, we go to this place and sit in a room... we sit, and sit, and sit. The person's car who is supposed to be talking to us, has broken down. I might have been the only person who found this funny, because the type that like engineering don't have a sense of humour. at all. ever.

You might be wondering why i was there when only 10 people from my year went, the other nine being freaks who do extra studying at lunchtime, who go to a maths club at the weekend and who ALWAYS seem to have a bad foot when it comes to PE lessons, oh and my friend Erica (but she was just there for moral support and moaned constantly - because that's what she does).

Well, i will tell you - i didn't want to go!!!! really, honestly i didn't, i am pathetic at engineering (or so i thought...) and i have got consistent 'C's and 'D's in my DT projects since year 7. The thing is, our head of year is a very very nice teacher called Miss Benson who, for some very odd reason seems to volunteer me for everything.

Anyway, where was i? oh yes, sitting in this room. Then after about an hour, this lady comes in. She is wearing what can only be described as a small dead dog, draped around her neck and she seemed genuinely cross with us for being there. After shouting at us about fire escapes for a bit, she gave us sheets of paper with tasks on and left us to get on with it.

Now, i'm going to tell the truth here - i had a lot of fun from here onwards. Our first task was to design an airbag for a car using sandwich bags, elastic bands and paper.

It didn't work but it LOOKED like it would work... and that's what people care about... right? i mean, the airbags in your car, do you KNOW that they work? They look like they would work, so you trust them, you'll probably never use them and until you actually have to, you'll go along perfectly happily putting your life into the hands of something that LOOKS like it would work.

I explained my theory to one of the proper engineer people there. He didn't get it. He just kept asking

"But what about after they've crashed and the airbag didn't work - they'll sue you". My answer was simple:

"No they won't - they'll be dead."

He told me that maybe engineering wasn't the right career choice for me. Then walked away.

Our second task was to create a little house for an egg. Not just any house - one that would protect it when it was dropped from 10 feet. To make this we had, elastic bands, those little bits of polystyrene you get in boxes, 1 piece of card, some newspaper and glue.
This is where the humourless geeks proved themselves to be rubbish at being geeks. They sat, staring blankly at eachother, occasionally saying things like "shall we make a box?".

This was when my first stroke of genius came to me.

Triangles.

Right?

So if i made a triangular based pyramid and put the egg in them padded the corners with newspaper, the egg would be held securely. Then, when we dropped it, if we could get it to land on the tip of the pyramid - the force will go through, the point, up the sides and barely touch the egg at all!

After making this, i stared at the left over material and began thinking about those multi-layered composite material thingies - you know, the ones that really fast cars are made out of?

So i stuck all of these leftover bit together to make like a little puffer-coat for the pyramid.

This involved using a hot glue gun. which made me happy.

Do you know how bad burning polystyrene smells?

Anyway, so we dropped it from 4ft, then 6, then 8 then 10 and the egg survived all of them!! This meant that we won!!!

We Won!

WE WON!!!

apparently it wasn't a competition, but still... WE WON!!

So, now you are asking , why doesn't she want to be an engineer, she's obviously BRILLIANT?

Well, did you know that only 5% of all of the engineers in the world are women?

Did you know that only 15% of all the engineering students in the world are female?

AND, if the amount of female engineers keeps increasing at the rate that it is at the moment, it would take 290 years for the amount of female and male engineers to be equal?

That's not why i don't want to be one though...

I just think it would be really really boring.