Featuring .. Sarah
Name : Sarah Alhuwaidi
Role : Electrical Maintenance Engineer
Location : Kuwait 🇰🇼
What work do you do and what does your role entail?
In my start, I worked at Shuabah-Power station as an electrical maintenance engineer, so I developed safety awareness, developing a preventive maintenance program and lead a multi-disciplinary project team. I worked on Motors, switchgear and CP system, so if there was any problem, they would call me to follow the problem and solve it. Sometimes it just about siting inspection to see the stability of the equipment.
Now I am leaving my career from electrical maintenance engineer in the power station sector to new job (electrical cable construction engineer) in the transmission sector. They had a training for operating authorization and there are only a few women already passed it.
What do you enjoy about your role?
Everyday there is something new to learn, the maintenance world is too much deep also you need to follow the upgrading technology to update your self. My work, especially in summer, will be changed from maintenance to troubleshooting, so you need to be fully focused, quiet and giving quick solutions. I really enjoy surprising the other departments when they saw a woman with full safety gear on the site because men not usually commit to safety rules.
My best day was the day when my female colleagues, they started to work in the site beside me after all my encouragement to drag them to field operations.
Do you have a favourite saying or quote?
Follow your heart, listen to your inner voice, stop caring about what others think.
What advice would you give to women?
Don’t give up.
Develop yourself.
Don’t let anything stop your dreams.
Tell us a funny story about your role or an amusing experience you’ve had:
At the interview time, the section head beholds that ‘there are no women work at the power stations so maybe we will reject you’. After I insist to work in electrical maintenance section at the power station and I convinced him that he will see me in the site with all my attention and development.
So the funny thing was when I started the work I got shocked because there were three women engineers in the section, so I was asking myself why was he trying to reject me? After a while, I found the secret, the problem was the girls didn’t appear any effort to work, just sItting in the office and no one had any idea what is the work and how it goes. So I understand why they were trying to reject me, so I worked on this issue and changed the idea about female engineers!
Any feedback or comments about your she wear footwear :
They are really comfortable safety shoes and clothes, nice colours and design. Keep the good work!
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Thank you Sarah, you are so very inspiring!!!!