Nikhil Mistry MEng Acoustical Engineering

Hi, I'm Nikhil Mistry and I studied MEng Acoustical Engineering within Engineering and the Environment at the University of Southampton.

I strongly recommend students to seek experience abroad, it is a very good way to network with some potentially very useful contacts for future career prospects.

I am thoroughly enjoying my course, it has exceeded my expectations and none of the course material has failed to interest me. 

I worked for three different companies between June 2011 and June 2012; the first being Arup in London (June 2011 - Sept 2011), the other two were AECOM in Canberra, Australia (Oct 2011 - March 2012) and SLR Consulting in Sydney, Australia (April 2012 - May 2012). 

I was working as a consultant for the three companies; at Arup I was set the task of producing auralisations to demonstrate speech privacy in meeting rooms and acoustic environments in various open office designs. (An auralisation is the audio equivalent of a visualisation, providing an acoustic 3D soundscape.) At AECOM I was involved with various projects concerning both building and environmental acoustics, for example advising on implementing walls in various consulting rooms within a hospital to ensure speech privacy, and designing a noise wall for a road that was to be widened, thus shielding houses from the high levels of noise from the increased volume of traffic. At SLR Consulting, I was working more in the environmental area and producing auralisations to demonstrate potential acoustic environments and noise levels from a proposed high speed railway for the north-west of Sydney. 

The placements were excellent and suspending my course for a year to visit Australia was invaluable; I was able to fully grasp Australian life whilst observing the way in which acoustics is used in another country.  Although this may not seem obvious at first, different countries have different methods through which to make calculations, different regulations, different rules with which to call judgements. Therefore, it was good to get an initial taste of consultancy in London and then compare it to what I did in Australia. 

I strongly recommend students seek experience abroad, it's an eye-opener...and a paid holiday! The work was fun, it was different, but I enjoyed it so it didn't really feel like work. It is also a very good way to network with some potentially very useful contacts for future career prospects. I am still eager to gain further experience in other countries!