Scholarship Visionary 2018: Sian Ebsworth
Sian Ebsworth is the winner of the 2018 Scholarship Visionary Award, having previously won the James Clayton Undergraduate Scholarship from the University of Bath in 2012.
Sian says the award gave her a real confidence boost as she progresses through her engineering career.
“Winning this award gave me a huge sense of pride and satisfaction,” she says. “It is always nice to have your achievements recognised, and it gave me a real confidence boost to keep striving in the career that I’ve started on.”
Sian now works at McLaren Applied Technologies as an associate systems engineer and a track support engineer for Formula E, having been involved in the “McLaren family” as she calls it since 2011.
“I worked for McLaren during my summer holidays and also as part of my university placements,” she says. “It felt natural upon graduation to return to McLaren and start my graduate career. I get to work across many different industries and in two really exciting roles.”
These twin roles means that Sian works in both problem solving for McLaren customers in areas as diverse as rail and medical, as well as working down at the track in Formula E.
“McLaren Applied Technologies are the sole battery supplier for the whole of Formula E grid,” she says. “As part of that, we have a team of people on the ground, myself included, to make sure each battery is running at optimum performance and it is not going to cause a team any issues.
“My role is being first point of contact for the teams and gathering and analysing all the data from the battery.”
And it is the variety that comes with these two roles that Sian loves.
“I get to work across the rail industry, the motorsport industry, the automotive industry and the medical and health industry,” she says. “The fact that with one job I can work across so many sectors is amazing, but it is not just that it is also the scale of the projects I work on that are different.
“I am particularly proud to work in the medical industry and develop products that will change people’s lives for the better.”