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Drilling Engineer
Marlene is your role model for the drilling engineer role. Other than tramping through rivers in gumboots, she squashes and blows up rocks to understand how strong they are. Before working at the University of Canterbury, she worked as a tunnelling engineer all over the world helping to design and build giant tunnels in rock. Her favourite part of her job is to travel to cool places to collect neat rocks so that she can figure out how strong they are for building things like tunnels and geothermal power plants and for understanding how volcanoes explode. One memorable job was when she worked on a big team that designed a 15 metre wide, 10 metre high tunnel under the city of Brisbane, Australia. It was absolutely gigantic and the design made sure that the tunnel was stable for 5 lanes of motorway traffic. Outside of work, Marlene love love loves rock climbing, which is great because she gets to spend lots of time climbing on rocks when she's working too!
