EW BrightSparks 2023 profile: Mary Kong, University of Edinburgh

Now in its sixth year of awards, EW BrightSparks sees Electronics Weekly highlight and celebrate some of the brightest and most talented young engineers in the UK today.

Here, in our series on the latest EW BrightSparks of 2023, we profile Mary Kong, a student at the University of Edinburgh.

Achievements

Mary is an Electronics and Electrical Engineering student and during her degree she’s been awarded a range of prizes for her academic performance.

For example, she won the 2021/22 Horsburgh Prize for being one of the top scoring students in engineering mathematics and the 2021/22 Electronics and Electrical Engineering Class Medal for the best performing student in her cohort.

Outside of her studies, Mary was employed as a part-time Electronics Technician in the University of Edinburgh’s uCreate Makerspace – the university’s biggest community makerspace – which is open to all staff and students for pursuing personal engineering projects.

As a member of Edinburgh University’s Hyperloop Team (HYPED), she contributed towards the development of Greyfriar’s Poddy – a 4th generation hyperloop pod for high-speed transportation. At European Hyperloop Week 2022, her team’s design was placed top five in one category of the design competition. (A hyperloop is a ground-level transportation system where people travel in a hovering pod inside a vacuum tube at speeds of up to approximately 760 mph.)

In addition to balancing her studies, her part-time job and her engineering projects, Mary has been awarded several scholarships including the University of Edinburgh Industrial Scholarship and the IET Diamond Jubilee Scholarship. Additionally, she was awarded a UKESF Scholarship with STMicroelectronics. And it was during her summer internship at STMicroelectronics that she successfully created an ultra-low power circuit for time of flight (ToF) sensors that are used in mobile devices.

Extracurricular, she has held committee positions in several university societies. For example, while she was the treasurer for the Edinburgh University Women in STEM (EUWiSTEM) society, the society managed to secure more than £2,000 in sponsorship funds which were used for various events to promote EDI (equality, diversity and inclusivity).

Additionally, Mary was elected president of the Edinburgh University Electronics and Electrical Engineering Society (EUEEE Soc). As the president, she co-organised the first collaborative, inter-engineering-society socials to strengthen the engineering student community as well as the first few Electrical Engineering annual balls for students and staff within the university.

As an aspiring young engineer, she told us she has striven to build a strong academic foundation to apply to a range of exciting and interdisciplinary engineering projects from medical devices to robotics and to integrated circuit design in the semiconductors industry. Her hope for the future is “to show people how creative we can be with electronics and become a role model in inspiring and encouraging the next generation of engineers”.

Electronics Industry Viewpoint
Stewart Edmondson, CEO of the UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF), also shared his viewpoint on what he described as Mary’s really impressive entry.

“Lots of really worthwhile outreach and engagement activities for this multi-prize winning and outstandingly able student,” Stewart told us. “And made a worthwhile contribution to work at STMicro during her placement.”

Community

During her degree, Mary also dedicated a lot of her time to STEM outreach and engagement.

For example, during her roles as treasurer for the Edinburgh University Women in STEM Society and president of the Electronics and Electrical Engineering Society, she worked with the committees to host various activities.

Some of the more technical events that they organised included teaching students how to use microcontroller boards with programming software and how to solder efficiently on a printed circuit board. Making the workshops free ensured that all students had access to learn new engineering skills.

Since the engineering curriculum at Edinburgh follows an interdisciplinary curriculum in first year – she told us – where engineering students are exposed to all the engineering disciplines, she mentored some younger engineering students as an EngPALS leader.

This is a peer-assisted learning scheme where students who are further along their degree offer sessions to support new students in learning mathematics and engineering. Due to her commitment and contributions towards the Edinburgh student community, Mary was awarded an Edinburgh Award for Leadership in Student Opportunities.

A recent community engagement activity that she volunteered at was one of the Engineering Development Trust’s Industrial Cadet programmes for high school pupils.

This took place at the STMicroelectronics Edinburgh office where Mary taught students about circuits, hardware simulators, breadboards and analogue circuit layout. She told us:

“When I was younger, it was during similar outreach events that I fell in love with engineering, and it was amazing to see the students’ excitement when they learned how to draw the structure of transistors using software – the miniature devices that make decisions in our computers!”