Profile

I live with my husband near Warwick, though we both grew up in Scotland. In my free time I watch a wide variety of TV shows and movies; usually while writing letters to my friends, who live all over the world, and eating chocolate. At work I sing in our ‘Gridtones’ choir and get involved in volunteering with schools. I also organise regular board games nights for friends from work.

I joined National Grid on the graduate programme and spent 18 months working in different parts of our gas business before moving into my role as a network analyst. I spent 6 months working on one of our gas sites in the far North of Scotland before changing to a team that supports the national control room for gas where I focused on predicting what the supply and demand would be for the next day so that we could prepare the network.

Now in my role as system strategy analyst we think about how things might change in the future and what that means for our network. We need to talk to people from different companies in the industry and look at different ideas and how much they’d cost. It involves lots of problem solving as the network is very interconnected and we’re affected by everything from the weather to world events.

My day varies a great deal depending what projects I’ve got going on as not all of them require analysis. There will usually be a mixture of spreadsheet calculations, writing or proof reading reports, meetings with my team and others that we work with, the occasional trip to a local school to talk with the students about careers, catching up with people I’ve met in the past to stay in touch and working on little projects that will help my team to do our jobs more effectively. At the end of each day I take time to write up everything so that I remember who I met and where I can find any information I might need again.