“To solve complicated problems, we need everybody’s mind on it”

This fall, Jessica Korzeniowska will be teaching her award-winning fantasy-themed training course in basic systems engineering at High Tech Institute. Bits&Chips sat down with her to talk about her background, her experiences as a systems engineer, her teaching method and the importance of reaching out to students, especially girls.

Jessica Korzeniowska hails from a family with a passion for aircraft engineering. Her grandfather was Polish and immigrated to the United Kingdom. Korzeniowska herself grew up in Milton Keynes, “a very normal town in the UK.”

Korzeniowska’s path in engineering started with a campaign during school to get more women into engineering. She thinks that’s what has made her passionate about creating a course that’s accessible for everybody. “Because I’m a product of other people trying to make engineering accessible.”

After a week’s work experience, specifically for girls, at a Royal Air Force base, she decided that engineering was what she wanted to do. “I think for me, it was a good mix of puzzles and problem-solving. I always loved puzzles and I loved building Lego, because you have to think innovatively, you have to think of new solutions. For me, engineering and the technical side of it are a mix of these two things. You can build something, you can create something. You have to problem-solve and think of ways to get there. I still enjoy it after making that decision half my lifetime ago in school.”

Know-it-all

Korzeniowska obtained a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Southampton, where she specialized in spacecraft engineering. She found it difficult to choose between the different technical disciplines until she took a module on spacecraft systems engineering in her third year.

“The lecturer stood up at the front of the class in the very first lecture and said that systems engineers are know-it-alls. They know little pieces about all the different subsystems that come together. They have a big-picture view of what the whole engineering product must do. And truthfully, the idea of being a know-it-all appealed to me. I also thought, maybe this is what I could do, because I like all these different technical areas, but I don’t like one of them enough to only do that. Then, out of university, I applied for systems engineering jobs and got those and became more experienced in the field. It’s continued to be something I enjoy, and I feel like it was the right choice.”

More girls

Korzeniowska is one of the few women engineers in the UK. Only 9 percent are female. Working in a technical environment with really difficult problems can be challenging, Korzeniowska says.

For women, it’s difficult in another way as well, because there aren’t many female engineers and parts of how companies work are still very male-dominated. You have an additional hurdle as a minority. Not only are you trying to work on technically challenging problems, but you’re also trying to break down stereotypes, challenge people’s unconscious biases, and that can be exhausting. It’s helpful if you have a good group of people around you, if you have people who support you, but it can be quite challenging in both the technical and personal sense. “In the end, I was fed up with having to deal with all the nonsense that women have to put up with, but I still wanted to be an engineer. So, I started my own business.”

Korzeniowska stresses that it’s important to encourage more girls to go into science and engineering, because we need them to end up in an engineering career. To solve all the technical challenges, we need the most diverse set of minds that we can possibly get, Korzeniowska says. “There are all sorts of statistics about diverse teams performing better; they’re able to solve challenges more flexibly, more efficiently. And so, we need everybody’s mind on it. And it’s not just about women; other groups may also be underrepresented in engineering.”

Model-based

As Korzeniowska progressed in her career, she started to become more and more of a trainer. “I did more outreach for science and I taught science in summer camp in America. I realized that I had the skills to teach and that I was enjoying it.”

Now, Korzeniowska is a partner at Scarecrow, a model-based systems engineering consultancy firm in the UK associated with High Tech Institute. “We do training, but we also do consultancy with a whole range of companies across the UK. We implement model-based systems engineering in their work because it’s a great way to manage the information in complex projects and make sure it’s consistent, and it helps us solve the problems. My background is space and nuclear fusion, so a lot of the consultancy I’m doing is still in the nuclear or energy domain.”

Korzeniowska is also an author of engineering textbooks, but she writes fiction stories as well. She’s using model-based techniques to help her model her fiction stories. “It’s a really great mechanism to handle a lot of information and keep track of everything, like the different characters and locations.”

Adventure quest

In her three-day course, Korzeniowska uses a fantasy-themed adventure quest to guide participants along their engineering training journey. There have been studies that show that people respond to storytelling, particularly in technical aspects, so she uses this to engage participants.

Korzeniowska remembers also her own experience with Lego. “I got into Lego when I was bought a Harry Potter set. I had never shown an interest in Lego before, but having a story associated with it and characters that I knew and to play out a certain scene, really engaged me in a building and construction method. I thought that this was just me, but there was actually a study done in the US that showed girls were more likely to interact with construction and building toys if there was a story to go with it.”

Korzeniowska started to think about how she could use methods that she knew had helped her learn, in her training and maybe also attract people who otherwise wouldn’t be in engineering. That’s where the adventures come from. “I wondered if you could take people through a training course of the V-model, as if they were walking through an enchanted valley. You journey up and down the valley in the same way you would in an engineering project, but then make it like it’s a quest.”

The Netherlands

Korzeniowska also spent a year in Leiden, where she got a job at the European Space Agency. “I graduated and then two weeks later, I turned up in the Netherlands with a suitcase and some euros. I was like, all right, let’s start a new life.”

She worked as a graduate trainee in ESA’s education office. “This is another aspect of my career that has helped me toward the training: we were thinking about how we can take industry-level space standards and translate them in a way that we can teach to students, so they can get hands-on experience of creating spacecraft and launching rockets. I loved living in the Netherlands. I’m hoping to be over here a lot more often, now that I’m delivering this training.”

This article was written in close collaboration with High Tech Institute.