Her enthusiasm for her job is infectious. "I absolutely love it. I wouldn't change." There are five girls in Orla McLaughlin's family. "I'm the oldest. When Dad was doing anything I'd get hauled up to help . . . even if it was only handing him a screwdriver."
Her father is an engineer and she helped him around the house with everything from building an extension to fixing kettles and toasters.
At school in Salerno, Salthill, Galway, McLaughlin always liked physics and maths. "I knew I wanted to do engineering but I hadn't decided between civil and mechanical."
What really decided her to go the mechanical route was a mechanical engineering open day in NUI Galway. "A lot of the final-year students and master's students had their projects on display."
The first two of four years at NUI Galway were the toughest. "I didn't really like first and second year. All of the engineering students were together - about 200 people in the lecture halls. Coming from an all-girls school, it was all-male oriented." Most of her school friends had opted for arts and sciences and were on different timetables.
In third and fourth year, the class divided. Her group had 43 men and one other woman. "I really enjoyed the course. I loved most of the subjects and there was a great class atmosphere."
McLaughlin graduated in July 1994 and got a place on a master's degree in aeronautical engineering in UL. Meanwhile, she took a job for a few weeks with Puritan Bennett, a medical company. When they offered her full-time employment as a manufacturing engineer she decided to stay on.
She was given full responsibility for a production line, making oxygen concentrators. "It was great. I got a very good overview of how the whole business worked." She liaised with planners to order materials as well as working on process improvement and dealing with customers, sales reps and service centres.
After two years, she moved to Boston Scientific. "It makes devices such as catheters and stents," she explains. Catheters are basically long tubes which are inserted into the body while stents are meshes which can be implanted to hold arteries open.
In her first year with Boston Scientific, McLaughlin again had line responsibility. She has worked in product and process transfer for the past year and a half.
"You learn all about anatomy and physiology - not just about stents and catheters," she says. "I love working in the medical device industry. I like the idea that it matters." It's a 39-hour week and she works on the day shift. She has travelled to Denmark and the United States but is involved in an in-house transfer at present.
Her advice to second-level students, especially girls interested in engineering, is: "Go for it. It's definitely male dominated and you have to come to terms with that - but I don't notice anymore."
