An unexpected passion for engineering
Wednesday 21 November 2018
Furey is using her experience to help bring industry projects into Swinburne's
Engineering Practice Academy.
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IN SUMMARY
Swinburne's Felicity Furey profiled for Engineers Australia's Create Digital
Felicity Furey never expected to be an engineer. It wasn’t until partway through
university that she found her passion for engineering and things ‘clicked’. Now she’s
working to inspire the next generation of engineers.
After success in the industry, running two not-for-profits dedicated to getting more girls
into maths and engineering, Furey has become a partner at Swinburne’s Engineering
Practice Academy.
“I hated maths,” says Furey of her time in high school.
“At the time I thought, ‘why would I want to do engineering?’”
Not really knowing why, Furey ended up putting engineering as a preference for
university and before she knew it, she was thrown right in the deep end.
“The first year of engineering was really challenging because back then, they didn’t
have the Engineers Without Borders or real-world projects, it was all very maths and
science heavy — I almost dropped out,” she said of her first year of study.
It wasn’t until in her second year in an applied assignment that involved designing a
housing estate that Furey began to develop a love for the field.
“I started to learn how psychology can affect road design and communities. I thought,
‘wow, this is really cool, we’re actually designing things for people’,” she said.
“That had never been highlighted to me before and that’s when I started to really enjoy
it.”
Designing for people
After graduating, Furey began working in the industry, securing roles at AECOM,
Brisbane City Council and Arup. But she still felt like she didn’t quite fit in.
“I never felt like I fit the ‘ideal’ of an engineer,” she says. This was compounded by the
fact that she would often be the only woman in meetings or working on a project.
Spurred on by the lack of diversity, Furey decided to take on a new challenge and co-
founded the not-for-profit Power of Engineering. Its goal is to empower a new
generation of diverse engineers, educating them on why engineering can change the
world.
“As engineers we get trained to analyse and process, but often we don’t think about the
larger context that the project is in,” she said.
“It’s easy to forget that everything that we’re designing is for people and there’s human
context. That’s been missing from how engineering is communicated to the general
public, and also in how engineers think about engineering.
“We get trained to be so efficient and analytical that we don’t think about the ‘why’, more
the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.”
Power of Engineering encourages young people to consider a diverse and creative
career in engineering, particularly focusing on women, regional and indigenous
students.
The organisation has now reached over 9,000 students across Australia through one
day events and partnerships with industry and universities. Seventy-five per cent of
students who were a ‘no’ to engineering before the day change their mind to a ‘yes’
after the event.
Furey also co-founded social enterprise Machinam, which motivates high school
students to engage with maths through authentic, real-world classroom resources. The
resources In Real Life have been used in maths classrooms in over 25 schools across
Australia.
Engineering Practice Academy
Drawing on all of her experiences and challenges, Furey recently joined Swinburne’s
Engineering Practice Academy where she hopes to further promote diversity and the
human factors of engineering.
Hearing about the Academy, Furey was struck by how much it aligned with her
professional goals.
“The Academy just makes sense. I felt like I had to learn all about business and self-
development through my own journey outside of my day job and this role at The
Academy is just so perfect as it brings all of my experience together,” she says.
“By taking on new challenges and building my diverse skill set, I’ve actually come full
circle and am in a position to influence and change engineering from the ground up in
education at the Academy.
“I wish I had something like this when I was at university.”
Furey is using her experience to help bring industry projects into the Academy and
working with the curriculum team to make sure that they align with what the students —
or, as they’re know at the Academy, ‘associates’ — need to learn.
“My experience mirrors that of what we are preparing the associates for, as they will be
faced with even more diverse and complex challenges as they enter their careers,” she
says.
“Creating engineers with a people and self-development focused skill set is critical for
engineers to be placed to solve the challenges of the future and the ones we are facing
right now – climate change, food waste and drought.”
“This role is like solving a complex engineering project by creating change in
engineering education and the engineering industry. This is what we should be telling
young people and the community that engineering is all about – being creative, solving
problems for people and making change happen.”
Industry interested in creating the new future of engineering can get in touch with the
Engineering Practice Academy.
This article was republished from Engineers Australia's Creat Digital publication. Read
the original article.
Swinburne and gender equity
Swinburne is part of the Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE) pilot program to
improve the promotion and retention of women and gender minorities in STEMM.
The university has long been a champion of gender equity and for the past nine
consecutive years has been recognised by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency
(WGEA) as an Employer of Choice for Women.
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