A Day in the Life of Lilian Knight, Sensors Engineer

The GradMail team took the time this month to catch up with Lilian Knight to hear about a day in her life at Thales and where in the business she works.

“I’m currently in my second year of the Graduate Development Programme as a Sensors Engineer based in Basingstoke. During my time here so far, I have been lucky enough to work on a range of different programmes. I spent my first twelve months in Missile Electronics working across several different projects on a variety of sensors; undertaking testing, data modelling and analysis, mostly for proximity fuses. I really enjoyed it as it gave an incredibly steep learning curve, both in terms of the products and the technical information and tools I was using; and although hard work at first, by the end of the year I definitely felt I had come a very long way!”

“I then had the opportunity to move across to a different business line and for the last six months I have been in Optronics working on a threat warning system for helicopters and light aircraft. I have taken on a more systems-related role, which involves preparing and running tests to validate the system. Day to day, my time is spent looking at footage of live firing trials and then extracting and analysing the data using MATLAB (a technical computing language and interactive environment) and Excel to so that it can be presented to the customer. It can be very busy at times, especially when things don’t look exactly as they should, but it means there is always a new challenge to overcome and I get to spend a lot of time with other members of the team. So I get to see a broad scope of the project. I have also been offered the chance to go to see the next set of live firing trials, which will be really exciting to witness!”

“Alongside my day job, I have also been part of a business development working group, tasked with trying to improve communication within Thales UK. This has been a great opportunity to work with a variety of people including several senior managers and sponsors within the business. Already we have made some changes to employees’ day to day life and I am now leading a spin- off project to create a Centenary Year Celebration display board for the company.”

“I have also been lucky enough to be invited to a First Women Awards Ceremony in London along with four other female engineers from Thales UK, to celebrate Dawn Ohlson, UK Director of Systems, winning the First Women’s Engineer Award. It was a fantastic evening and I got to meet some incredibly talented women who have all been pioneers in their own particular fields. We all left feeling incredibly inspired by how much people can achieve within their career.”