Question: what made you want to be an engineer ??

Masha Folk answered on 7 Nov 2016:

When I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. I loved stars and planets and anything to do with space. When I went to university, I enrolled in the aeronautical and astronautical engineering (or aerospace engineering). On this course, we had to learn about both airplanes and rockets flying through the air and I found that I really liked learning about flight. Instead of being an astronaut, I now wanted to make things go really fast – like rockets and airplanes. I studied both rocket propulsion and jet engine propulsion – the rocket propulsion seemed to me to focus too much on chemistry, which I didn’t like, while the jet engine propulsion was more to do with aerodynamics and thermodynamics. So, I stuck with jet engine propulsion and that’s how I ended up doing research in fluid mechanics and gas turbine engineering!