How to become a dinghy design?

[peterhalswell]

Dear all,

I'm a second year engineering student at exeter university. My dream job is to become a dinghy designer, ideally designing boats for Laser, RS or someone similar. But I have no idea how to get there!!!

Can someone please help me;
-What are employers looking for? Is a mechanical engineering degree enough or are there better courses.

-Where would I go to get a summer placement/work experience. Laser and RS have no schemes and can not help me.

-Who would potentially employ me or is it free lance work. When I rang RS they said that it was free lance but Laser said they had a design team.

Any advise welcome, whether its answering the question or just good tips and pointers.

Thanks
Pete

[BOATMIK]

The best answer is to start designing and building boats within existing classes - or as plans for other people to build.

If you can get some sort of success or notoriety that way you may be able to interest one of the big manufacturers.

But really you have to look at putting together a big grab bag of skills and not focus simply on dinghies.

At the moment there is a huge flood of people using software to draw cool looking boats sitting prettilly 3D on rasterised oceans.

Most of them will never be built and there is no chance of standing out from the crowd if you do the same thing. The way to stand out is to get things built - even if you have to build them yourself.

Get REAL knowledge that way and you become useful in the marketplace.

But the main thing is not to focus on one area too narrowly.

Michael