One to Watch: Bioengineering student Shruti Vasudev makes her mark on her placement year.

Last year Shruti spoke to us about choosing Sheffield and her experiences so far at the University. A year on and she has made the most of the opportunities that have come her way by actively seeking out further career opportunities and training to add to her ever-growing knowledge and experience of engineering.

Being highly motivated and ambitious one of Shruti’s greatest achievements over this past year took place on her placement year with National Instruments (NI) where she led a team to victory working on a robotic arm draughts opponent.

Tell us about the team you successfully managed to victory:

Each year the Application Engineering (AE) department at NI divides itself into four teams to participate in the four-month long AE projects competition alongside our daily roles. Rather than sit back I nominated myself to become the project manager for one of the groups which saw me lead other interns as well as graduate experienced employees by creating an automated draughts opponent using LabVIEW and the new NI myRIO. We were announced as winners and treated to a lovely day out and gifted an NI branded polo shirt with 'AE project winners 2014' written on the back. 

The experience helped me realise my passion for management and I decided to enroll onto an external self-funded course called PRINCE2. This course is a project management course that many companies follow the principles of and I passed both the foundation and practitioner exams for the course and am now officially a PRINCE2 Practitioner. NI have offered me a graduate job to be taken up upon the completion of my degree after seeing my work and enthusiasm over the year.

How did it feel managing a group of engineers?
Part of my group was made up of interns who started with me and had similar levels of technical knowledge and experience as me so it was easier than I thought. The experienced engineers are great at what they do and with them I took the approach of learning from their individual management styles and experiences. I would ask them for their opinions on how a task should be done and then use the advice that made most sense to me and matched my project plans. When I nominated myself for the role I knew this was my one chance to learn about project management from the experienced team members on this team who had had previous experience at managing teams and were willing to teach me as we went along .

You said you nominated yourself - do you feel pressure to 'step forward' and be seen because of your gender or are you a natural leader?
No, I did not feel pressured at all. I do agree that there are fewer women than men in the engineering industry but that is changing and if you work hard and prove yourself to be worthy of a role then people will respect you irrespective of your gender. I feel I am a natural leader who thrives in management related roles and am constantly trying to improve and further develop my leadership skills by learning from the people around me. 

Every team in the project had a mentor and I took a lot of guidance from our mentor for my project manager role. My mentor helped me develop my management style and advised me on different approaches to managing the different people in the team and I learned a great deal as a result of this.

What’s been the biggest learning curve?
Very early on in this internship I realised that I am here not to prove myself or the skills I already possess but to try and acquire new skills and knowledge from the pool of brilliant, talented and experienced engineers I was working with. This attitude and willingness to learn is what I feel, has benefited me most during this placement year. It has enabled me to have no inhibitions when working with more experienced people in the department and ask them to teach me something they are good at. 

What else are you working on at National Instruments at the moment?
I joined NI as an Applications Engineer, where after my intense training of two months, I began supporting our customers. NI has about 35,000 companies as customers around the world in different sectors of engineering and my role as Applications Engineer is to support these customers using our products. I have to understand their engineering applications which could range from medical to aerospace to radio frequency related. Many at times I need to recreate their problems in our lab using the same products and then try and find a technical solution for them.

I was also given the opportunity to do a three month stint/rotation in the technical sales department as a technical sales engineer. These three months really opened my eyes to the business side of engineering and gave me a different perspective of the industry. My role was primarily understanding the application needs of our customers and supporting them by advising on the right software and hardware products to satisfy their needs. Many at times I had to match their specifications with our products and produce a product list and quote for them. I was mainly in-charge of business in Scotland and North East of England and worked with a Field Engineer based in the area to support our business in the area.

Tell us more about the rowing event you organised as part of the NI team:
This was a fun event. Every year the Newbury Round table organises a massive charity event called Crafty Craft which involves building your own boat, forming a team and taking part in a boat race in the canal in Newbury. This year I was in-charge of organising our team. I began working on oganising teams to work on this event with me and I got some very talented people to fix our boat, paint it and also got some great rowers from the company. The theme for Crafty Craft this year was 'Brazilian Adventure'  and we named our team 'myRIO Car-NI-val' – a pun on the latest NI product myRIO and NI for National Instruments.

Hard Work, Luck and a Great Mentor = the Perfect Recipe for Success

Annette Baxter from the Careers Service explains the difference a good mentor can make. She draws on the examples of elite athletes, and the support teams that guide them towards their success, illustrating the importance of developing a network for achieving your goals. Annette also highlights mentoring schemes engineering students can access.


Ask most successful people what it was that helped them to achieve success in their careers, and many will mention a lot of hard work, some will say a modicum of luck but most will also refer to the help and support they received from a significant person who pointed them in the right direction or gave them the time, encouragement and support to achieve their goals. Some would call this inspirational person a friend, a parent, a teacher or a manager but the common term in industry is often a mentor.

A mentor can share the benefits of their experience and insights in industry, a company or job role; they can give you advice and tips on the recruitment process and help you face job search and progression with greater confidence. They may also help you to assess your current skills, identify gaps in your skill or knowledge base and then help you to identify strategies for meeting these development needs.

"Remember the old phrase ‘it’s not just what you know, but who you know’ that can make the difference."

No one can ever tell you what to do, but people often say that discussing a situation with another objective person can help them to see different perspectives, generate other ideas, find alternative ways of overcoming obstacles or handling situations and therefore make better decisions – benefiting from the experience (and mistakes) of someone else who may have been in that situation before.

Whatever you want to achieve, your role as mentee is to define the goals you want to achieve and a mentor may be able to help you to identify the steps you need to take to achieve them, offering feedback and encouragement along the way.

When you look at any successful athlete or sportsperson like Andy Murray or our very own Jessica Ennis, they are surrounded by a team of people to help them reach peak performance and achieve the accolade in their event. They may have a coach, nutritionist, physiotherapist just to name a few and just as in sports, you may want to build a team around you to improve your career fitness and support you to achieve success in your career.


In the careers sense ‘your team’ may include an academic or project supervisor, a Careers Adviser, family members but it can also include a career mentor (or all of them), each able to offer you advice and support to help you achieve your career goals.

You don’t have to wait until you get into employment to have a mentor, you can start to build your network now by contacting the Careers Service and speaking to a careers adviser. You may want to join the Email Mentoring Scheme offered by the Careers Service, and mentoring schemes are also offered by professional bodies such as the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) who offer mentoring to engineering students.

If you want to widen your professional network wider, professional bodies such as Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) or Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) also have opportunities for students to meet with society members and build their professional network. Social media sites such as LinkedIn can also be invaluable to help you develop your professional networks but who knows, this may be the topic of a future blog on this site!

Remember the old phrase ‘it’s not just what you know, but who you know’ that can make the difference. Start today by building your network and finding your mentor for success.