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My interview with Dr Jim Harkin, Head of the School of Computing, Engineering
and Intelligent Systems.
Ulster University
Magee Campus
By Dearbhla Catterson
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What was it about engineering Jim that first attracted you to the career? Did you always want to be an engineer?
" I always loved to find out how things worked, the surprise in understanding how a car engine worked, how the radio played music, how does the sound get sent by a phone, how did the traffic lights always get it right! I always wanted to be someone who tried to solve problems and build solutions. I had hours and hours of fun in using Lego to build my ideas."
What is the best thing about your job?
"In my job I get to work with many other engineers on really big problems that are very difficult to solve and take many repeated attempts in building a solution. I get the chance to work on the latest technology and also to travel to different places to tell other engineers about how I and my team have discovered some new solutions! I really enjoy working in a team and creating new electronic circuits which my team mates and I spend time on getting things to work correctly"
What skills from your school days do you use in your job?
"I use mathematics in my job and a lot of thinking and trying to be creative (sketching out circuit diagrams). Being able to talk and work with other people is really important; respecting each other. These are skills that I learned at School and need in my job as an engineer."
"In a typical day I meet with fellow engineers and look at results from circuits or designs that we have created and see what is not working, and look at new ideas to try and get the circuit fully working. This involves using a very fast computer to draw the electronic circuit diagrams and to test them out. I also would daily have to write down all my ideas and any results that I obtain and present (talk) with the engineers in my team."
"The best project had to be “Building an electronic circuit that can repair by itself”. I loved this project as I got to work with scientist that understand how the human brain works. They told me and my team information on how the brain can repair itself if it got damaged and we then tried to copy that idea and built a circuit to do the same. That was real fun but took a lot of time as we didn’t know at the start how to do it. "