CARMEL Hennessy is dressed in a smart lilac business jacket. She sits at the conference table as to the manor born, glasses pushed up on her nose, black folder open in front of her and pen at the ready.

She spends many hours each week at various types of business meetings, managing, negotiating and steering. One wonders if like the woman in the cheese ad, she will ever whip off her glasses, loosen her hair and burst into song.

Hennessy has been working as an assistant property manager with Irish Estates Management Ltd since June. Only a few months ago, she says, she was a carefree student in jeans and runners at Limerick RTC, studying for her BSc in property, valuation and management.

The thought causes her to smile in awe sometimes, she says, especially when she looks around the conference table: usually she is the youngest person there, and generally the only woman.

The key to Hennessy's career choice was her passion for economics. "I loved economics at school," she says. "I absolutely loved it. Once you've grasped the fundamentals, it is very much a common sense subject."

After completing her Leaving Cert in 1992 at St Joseph's Secondary School, Newtownforbes Co Longford, she knew exactly what she wanted to study.

"I wanted something where you were active. I wanted something that had a technical side to it. This a multi-skilled career there's a lot of business but there's a technical side too." She also wanted a job where meeting and dealing with people would be part and parcel of each day. She is delighted with her choice. "I'm an outgoing person, she adds.

Today her work involves managing a portfolio of large office buildings in the Ballsbridge area of Dublin. "We manage everything to do with the properties," she explains. She deals with any tenant enquiries oversees lettings and sublettings, makes regular site inspections, looks after the day-to-day repairs of each property and handles rent reviews and service-charge budgets. Her job also involves managing the security, reception and on-site personnel at each building. There are car-parking issues to be organised as well.

The subjects she studied during her four years at Limerick RTC come in handy. Construction studies in particular is a great asset, she says, especially when it comes to dealing with problems like rising damp, water ingress, loose ceiling tiles or a faulty window frame.

Hennessy is there in control, representing the interests and concerns of the investors who are represented by Irish Estates Management. "We are the medium between them and the tenants," she explains.

Other areas of study that she now finds valuable include applied valuation, planning, computers. development economics and management and law. "You really need law," she says.

Some of her contemporaries from Limerick RTC have gone on to work with residential estate agencies. However it was the busy commercial property world in the city that appealed to Carmel Hennessy.

She applied to Irish Estates Management to do work experience with them in her third year at college. During this 10-month stint as an assistant property surveyor she realised what she really wanted to do. The experience of working in a closely supervised situation with a company which was to become her employer, was hugely beneficial", she says. "When you have experience, you are more readily employable." she adds.

Studying theoretical situations in fourth year was more fun. Her thesis, on the subject of institutional property investment in Ireland and its future prospects, has been completed, bound and submitted and she is to graduate later this year, with the first graduates of the Limerick RTC degree in property valuation and management (valuation surveying). After that Hennessy wants to proceed to a PhD.

In the future, she wants to do something in valuation". For now, she says, "my portfolio is only starting off, but I want to move out and expand into different areas."