Rachel Mundy left in 1988 and is a civil engineer working on flood defence across the South West. Her work is the sort that is invisible when it succeeds: embankments, culverts, storage areas upstream of towns that have flooded twice in living memory and would like not to do it again.

"People think civil engineering is bridges," she says. "Most of it is drainage, and drainage is mostly arithmetic and arguing with people about land. The maths I use every week I learned in the fifth form. The arguing I learned later."

She is keen to talk to any student considering engineering, and particularly to girls being quietly steered towards the life sciences instead. She comes to the careers evening most years and says the most useful question a student ever asked her was what she does on a normal Tuesday.