The Secret Graduate Engineer: Get comfortable being uncomfortable

As a rule, discomfort is a state most of us seek to avoid throughout our lives. Given the choice between a bed of nails and a feather down pillow I know which I’d choose. So perhaps it’s strange that the first thing I write as a graduate engineer is a piece on the upsides of being just that little bit uncomfortable.

I recently walked out of university, aerospace engineering degree in hand, into a firm as a graduate employee. Like many others, it’s a fairly large company that nobody outside the aero sector will have heard of, working in the supply chain of the three or four companies that everyone will know. The exact route I took here is a story for another article but the experience once I arrived would, I suspect, be familiar to many others who’ve been the newbie. At first there’s the reassuringly mundane paperwork of payroll, followed by the half dozen signatures to verify your understanding of light switches and trip hazards that comes with any job. Soon, though, you’re at a workstation trying hard to absorb the torrent of information provided by colleagues, and the puns suggesting that aero grads “can’t just wing it”.