Here, in our series on the latest EW BrightSparks of 2022, we highlight Oana Lazar, who was an MEng Electronic Engineering student at the University of Southampton and now works as a Software Engineer at Siemens Digital Industries Software.
Achievement
Despite being an undergraduate in her final year, Oana was already showing her engineer skills, professionalism and the ability to set her plans into motion, often helping other people via outreach programmes.
She has become, we learned, a strong advocate for women in engineering, who proudly represents her company, university, and the UKESF in industry panels. For example, engaging with the Siemens CEO during company-wide EDI sessions.
She completed >30 hours of CPD with the IET and IEEE, and also participated in company-wide ‘all-hands’ for both Tessent and Siemens, learning about their strategy and industrial trends. She put her learning to good effect by applying to the University of Southampton’s ‘100 Big Ideas’ enterprise competition, which she won despite the number of applications having been almost double that of previous years.
During her 12-month placement with Tessent Embedded Analytics (A Siemens Company), she successfully worked on a new product called the Embedded Software Development Kit (ESDK). She satisfied a key design requirement for ESDK through creating a low-level C library, achieved excellent code coverage and created the first ESDK customer demo.
She consistently went above and beyond the expectations for her role, we learned, resolving issues and redesigning a component, and discovering possible hardware bugs and devising solutions. She also paid particular attention to in-code comments and documentation, meticulously reviewing technical and customer-facing documentation.
In total, she single-handedly contributed a significant amount of code to her project, whihc was confirmed by SLOCCount, a tool for evaluating the amount of work contributed to software projects. Her supervisors, she proudly shared, mentioned that the quality of her work was at the level of a Senior Engineer, not an intern.
From this, she was honoured to be put forward by Tessent’s VP of Engineering, and Siemens’ Senior Director of Portfolio Strategy, for the Global Semiconductor Alliance’s ‘Female Up and Comer Award’, as the sole representative of Tessent.
Finally, her industrial placement finished on a very high note as she was named the 2021 UKESF ‘Scholar of the Year’. Oana told us she hopes to build on this by continuing to share her love for Electronic Engineering and put outreach at the heart of everything she does.
Community / STEM
In terms of STEM or community work, Oana has been involved with a wide range of projects.
Her greatest contribution to outreach so far, she felt, was being a Coordinator for Invent Plus, in 2020-21. This is an incubator project from Southampton’s branch of Student Hubs, which is a national charity mainstreaming student social action.
It aims to share engineering with school children from disadvantaged backgrounds, helping to bridge the STEM inequality gap. Oana chose this past year’s focus to be girls in STEM, kick-starting a partnership with the University’s Widening Participation team.
For context, back in autumn 2020, Invent Plus had no volunteers, funding, nor plans for activities during the pandemic. Oana’s first action in her role was successfully applying for £5,000 through the IET’s Engineering Education Grant Scheme, ensuring the project’s continuation for three years, and defining her strategic vision for its future.
She remotely recruited, trained, and managed a team of 10 new volunteers. Together, they created 600 practical activity packs. These were used for introducing 200 Year 9 girls, across nine different, schools to Electronic, Acoustical, and Mechanical engineering by building electronic circuits on breadboards.
The key part of these packs were the booklets explaining electronics, which Oana developed together with her volunteers.
In addition to managing Invent Plus, Oana was a panellist on the University of Southampton’s ‘Women in STEMM’ event.
Specifically she showcased the group’s work during the Southampton Science and Engineering Festival, which engaged with more than 250,000 people.
She also wrote articles and ran Student Hubs’ social media for INWED21, was nominated for SUSU’s ‘Committee Member of the Year Award’ and won her Hub’s first ‘Values Award’.
Oana was the 2021-22 Southampton Hub President, managing Invent Plus at a strategic level, and continuing to engage with Invent Plus activities and events. For example, these include a panel session for International Day of Women and Girls in Science; running weekly workshops in local primary schools; and organising events for the Southampton Science & Engineering Day.
On the university societies level, Oana is also the Outreach Officer for the Spaceflight Society, and has helped run events for World Space Week showcasing female astronauts and space scientists from around the world.
Additionally, she was a key organiser for Pint of Science, running the ‘Tech Me Out’ show, sharing bleeding-edge developments in cybersecurity with 400 members of the general public.
She also helped set up and run the Student Robotics‘ 2022 in-person Competition. This challenged Year 12 and 13 students to design, build, and program autonomous robots to fulfil specific tasks, and by doing so, they are supporting students in learning more about the exciting possibilities of electronics.
She is pictured above receiving her award from Isabella Mascarenhas (VP, Grass Roots & Shining Stars, RS Group), one of the EW BrightSparks judges, and Richard Watts (emap MD, publisher of Electronics Weekly). Congratulations to Oana!
BrightSparks 2022 overview
EW BrightSparks Supporters
We are very grateful to the companies and organisations that help support the EW BrightSparks programme, and make it possible. Special thanks to: TE Connectivity and the UK Electronics Skills Foundation.
TE Connectivity
TE Connectivity is a global industrial technology leader creating a safer, sustainable, productive, and connected future. Our broad range of connectivity and sensor solutions, proven in the harshest environments, enable advancements in transportation, industrial applications, medical technology, energy, data communications, and the home. With more than 85,000 employees, including over 8,000 engineers, working alongside customers in approximately 140 countries, TE ensures that EVERY CONNECTION COUNTS. We are delighted to be involved in the Bright Sparks initiative which allows TE Connectivity to learn from and inspire the next generation of engineers. Learn more at www.te.com and on LinkedIn, Facebook, WeChat and Twitter.
UK Electronics Skills Foundation
The UKESF’s mission is to encourage more young people to study Electronics and to pursue careers in the sector. In the UK, the Electronics sector is big, valuable and growing; however, the demand for capable, employable graduates is currently outstripping supply. We are an educational charity, launched in 2010, with both public and private seed-corn funding. We operate collaboratively with major companies, leading universities and other organisations to tackle the skills shortage in the Electronics sector.
