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Tuesday 7 March 2017 12:00 PM
Carina Leonhardt on problem solving
"Engineering can be so fascinating”, says Carina Leonhardt. “Spending ages wrestling with a problem and then hitting on the solution, it's just great.” The 22-year-old finished her dual work/study industrial engineering degree course on October 1, 2016 and has since been a project engineer working on Rail PowerPacks at MTU in Friedrichshafen. Young she may be, but she comes across as very self-assured and in control. And her enthusiasm for her job really shows.
During her degree, Carina tested the water at MTU with an internship in Application Engineering and enjoyed it so much she decided to stay on after graduating. She is currently working on modularizing the Rail PowerPack, with specific responsibility for tanks, and for project scheduling. With more than 1,000 individual steps involved in the project, her job is to maintain the top-level view and keep an eye on dependencies.
What she particularly enjoys is the combination of business and engineering. “The great thing about application engineering is that the solution ends up getting built,” Carina says. “I'm involved with the product all the way until it's bolted underneath the train ready to work for the customer.” She says the solution has to work not just in the mind's eye but also in practice, even under the most testing of conditions. “Everything can work on paper. But when a component comes up against -40° Celsius, it's a whole different ballgame,” she continues. Yet it is precisely this ballgame – taking a problem and eventually solving it – which is the most fun part of her job.
Her enthusiasm for engineering may also have something to do with her brothers. At home in the Allgäu, talk around the kitchen table also featured discourses on the workings of engines. She attended a technical high school, choosing the 'Engineering & Management' stream – a mix of business and engineering which laid the foundation for her subsequent studies. In her year, all the dual work/study industrial engineering students at MTU were female. “We had real girl-power that year,” she recalls with a laugh.
Looking to the future, she expects to see more women embarking on technical careers, especially in view of the wholesale changes made to the apprentice training system, and the mindset-shift that has taken place. Even though all the colleagues in her department are men, she has never once felt left out of things as a woman in a technical career. “If you perform well and understand the technology behind things, you get taken seriously.” Ultimately, she says, it doesn't matter what career you embark on – whether its engineering, commercial or something entirely different. “The most important thing is to enjoy it and go to work each morning with a spring in your step.”