Work experience as a sponsored student helped Catherine Whitehead confirm that she was making the right career choice.

Catherine Whitehead has just passed the professional review to qualify as a chartered civil engineer with the Institution of Civil Engineers.  It has been the culmination of almost 10 years training and experience with Tony Gee & Partners, first as a sponsored student and then as a graduate engineer.

Whitehead joined Tony Gee and Partners as a sponsored student through both the Surrey Setpoint Scholars and the ICE Quest Scheme in 2005. The award of both these scholarships and the link to industry before starting university gave her a head start into the working life of a civil engineer as well as financial support towards her university tuition fees.

“I enjoy the new engineering challenges that each project brings as well as the project management. I see my future being at Tony Gee & Partners and it turns out the aptitude tests I took were right. This is the job for me.”

Before obtaining the scholarships Catherine did not know what to do with her favorite subjects of maths and physics but through various careers aptitude tests and advice from the school careers officer, civil engineering came out top.

“I had never heard of civil engineering before and so carried out some background reading before finding the ICE. I later attended a school careers fair where I listened to a talk from a civil engineer who had worked on the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. I am a sports fan and the thought of the potential opportunities to work on large scale structures captured my imagination,” she says  I knew immediately it was a career I had to pursue”.

Tony Gee & Partners has 40 sponsored students on the books at any one time and they form “the core of the firm’s technical expertise,” according to executive managing director Graham Nicholson. “We lose a few but generally they stay and our retention rate is 88%. By bringing them in early we can train them in our way of doing things and of designing.”

Whitehead particularly enjoyed the summer placements and the student week visits offered as part of the scholarship. Each summer she moved around the Rail, Structures and Highway Groups. It was good experience seeing how each group gets involved with different aspects of projects as well as working together to achieve the project goals. It was also a way to meet other students in different universities all working towards the same aim.

After a four year MEng course at the University of Southampton she graduated in 2009 and joined the Tony Gee Esher office where she spent six months in the highways group before joining the structures group. She has remained here since, working alongside a growing team of experienced engineers for a variety of clients on both temporary and permanent works.

“My highlight to date has been the project engineer role on the Eton Dorney temporary footbridge across the River Thames. Liaising directly with the contractor and working to tight programmes allowed me to enhance my project management and civil engineering skills,” she says.

 “I was also given the opportunity to swap with an Osborne graduate for site experience in 2013. I spent 14 months with osborne in its Infrastructure team working on Network Rail and South West Trains Access for All (AfA) schemes including Aldershot and Fleet stations in Hampshire.”

Most recently she has been involved in the replacement of a highways bridge in Bolton as part of the Network Rail electrification programme. She is responsible for the substructure design and coordination of the interfaces between the old and new elements.

“It’s all been brilliant,” she says. “I enjoy the new engineering challenges that each project brings as well as the project management. I see my future being at Tony Gee & Partners and it turns out the aptitude tests I took were right. This is the job for me.”