First Entry

Ever since I started my 8-week summer placement on London’s Olympic Park, I’ve wanted to blog about it. Okay, so a job is a job, and maybe there won’t be a whole wealth of exciting things to blog about, but there are a few reasons that I want to try.

Firstly and most simply, to inform. As an engineering student, I knew almost nothing about what to expect from my site job, so it seems logical that anyone without three quarters of a Masters degree under their belt might know even less about the nature of working on such a project. I feel like people recoil from the concept of engineering because it just sounds complex. The word itself is associated with numbers and graphs and technology in the minds of the general public. In reality, we only get technical when we’re forced to, and that probably only makes up 20 or 10% of our day. I want to show what a site engineer really does.

Secondly, I want to somehow capture the totally unglamorous, almost nonchalant way that beautiful and inspirational structures can be created- also to explore the realism, humanity and genius of the engineers behind them. From an outside perspective it can seem like structures mystically rise from the ground, slowly gaining floors each time you pass them, builders crawling over them like ants, busily working away. I want to show construction as it really is- a continuous process which involves hundreds of tiny, precise tasks that all combine to give the end result. The scale of the Olympic project is incredible, and I want to capture that along with the amazing teamwork needed to make the Olympics a reality.

Thirdly, I want to portray the construction industry as it really is, without the stereotypes and stigmas that usually accompany it in the media. I want to show you that the Olympics was made by people, people leading normal lives, people who have peanut butter on toast and play rock paper scissors.

I’ll aim to update once or twice a week (1 week has already passed, so I’ll post this, and one to cover my whole first week or so). Any extra updates will be a bonus! I’ll also try to upload photos and maybe mini posts if something significant happens to me.

Let’s learn about engineering then, shall we?