Julia Rezende Falcao has made the unusual transition from growing up in Brazil to working on bridges in Warwickshire - and she is loving it.
Julia is in the second year of a five-year civil engineering degree apprenticeship at Warwickshire County Council. Her passion for engineering was planted early as her mother Fernanda was an engineer with Jaguar Land Rover in her native country. When Fernanda moved to the England to work at JLR’s Warwickshire headquarters, Julia joined her in the new life - and soon embraced the career opportunities that came with it.
“With my mum at JLR I was always very involved in family days and went to them and learned about things like the production line,” she said. “I always had an interest in engineering because of mum, although she is a mechanical engineer and I am doing civil engineering.
“We moved to the UK in 2019 and I did GCSEs at Myton and then maths, physics, Spanish and Portuguese at sixth form. I enjoyed those and then was really pleased to go into the degree apprenticeship at the county council, partnered with the University of Warwick.
“It’s an 80-20 split between working and studying. A full-time degree would last three years but mine is five. I’m at university one week a month from January to June and then work full-time when I'm not at university.
“I like that it’s very challenging. It was the maths that brought me into it but now that I’ve been in the degree apprenticeship for a year and a half, I’ve really enjoyed all the other different aspects; project management, design, getting to know about construction materials and the creative element too. It is very involved. With civil engineering you get to dip into all sorts of different modules.”
Julia is learning all the time but also, as part of the bridge design team, making a real difference to the lives of people in the county. Bridges are the unsung heroes of the local economy. If they crack, falter or fail…well, just think about your last journey - almost certainly it required one or several bridges.
The County Council is responsible for the maintenance of 1,150 bridges around Warwickshire, an essential role of which Julia is now part.
“I have worked on quite a few projects - Portobello Bridge between Warwick and Leamington, Avon Mill in Rugby, I’m now involved with Stannals bridge in Stratford. I work on a project for a few months and then move to another which makes it really varied and interesting."
“Before joining the team I hadn’t realised how many bridges there are. Now whenever I cross one I look and think, is that structure okay? Did that one have a crack and that could mean this?
“It’s really interesting work and after five years, hopefully I’ll get a degree and become incorporated with the Institute of Civil Engineers.”
And then?
“It’s preferred that after an apprentice is trained by the county council they stay - and I have every intention to stay. After I moved to England, and the pandemic happened almost straight away, it was culture shock after culture shock, so it took time to adapt but I am 80 per cent there now! I love it here.”