How a mistake can shape your future

Part of our International Women's Day feature

How a mistake can shape your future was clearly illustrated by Regina Clery when she addressed a conference on Women in Leadership at the Mullingar Park Hotel to mark International Women’s Day.

Her story goes around the world from the FCA in Mullingar to Antarctica, with Australia, New Zealand and China in between. Now she is home, working as a civil engineer with Irish Rail and studying for the arts degree she turned her back on two decades ago.

Regina told how, with a good Leaving Cert under her belt, she went off to art college to study fashion design because she loves all things “design”. She was destined to become an art teacher, but two years in, she left. She felt she had made the biggest mistake of her life because she loved art and she had no idea what she was going to do.

As she was walking past the FAS office in Mullingar, Regina spotted an advertisement for a computer aided design course and enrolled. Around the same time, she joined the FCA, the reserve defence force, because a lot of her friends had joined and it sounded like “they were having a good time, abseiling and going down white water rapids and orienteering and having great craic”.

She signed up and within a year she was sent on a training course to the Curragh, made corporal and went on to become a detachment commander.

That was more than 20 years ago, but Regina still remembers how it was then that she found her voice. She was sent on a course on which she had 80 people to march around a square. She quickly learned the art of voice projection and how to manage her nervousness, not shutting it down, but using it as a tool – which proved invaluable to her later in her career.

Meanwhile, Regina was still doing her FAS course, which involved designing houses, but her instructor complained that she was asking too many architectural questions and suggested she should be doing construction studies in Athlone IT, which was across the road from the FAS centre.

She felt it was a course for the boys, but she did it anyway and passed with distinction. She was one of three girls on the course.

She discovered she was good at surveying and she enjoyed it, but her lecturer said it was engineers that were needed, not surveyors.

So Regina did a bridging course in mathematics – “the hardest thing I ever did in my life”, and an honours degree in civil engineering. Then the economic crash came – the building industry went into recession, and Regina was left wondering once more what was she going to do.

What she did was study sustainable energy at UCD and then emigrate to Australia.

Regina spoke of the fantastic opportunities that presented themselves in Australia. She found herself in the wilds of that vast country, 14 hours from civilisation, on a goat farm, drawing up plans for tourist chalets as she waited for her visa.

Then she moved to Perth, and worked in the mines before applying to lecture in TAFE, the equivalent of an IT, at the Central Institute of Technology in Perth.

They were looking for lecturers in building construction and engineering, but she needed teacher training for the post so she did a fast track teacher training course.

At the interview, Regina recalled, she was asked by the all-male panel how she would deal with a class that was predominantly male and she told them she had been a detachment commander in the artillery reserves in Ireland. She got the job.

She taught there for four years and was nominated for a teacher of the year award. She designed courses in engineering, and brought into play all the “soft skills – communication, asserting yourself, self-esteem, self-worth, all the stuff I had learned in the army”.

Meanwhile, Regina was clinging to her sustainable energy degree from UCD and was trying to weave her way into that end of things.

She was attending lectures given by a university that had hired some of the rooms at the college. Staff were allowed to attend and during one lecture she put her hand up to ask a question on lifecycle analysis.

The lecturer approached her and on discovering she had a sustainable energy qualification, asked if she would join an expedition to Antarctica.

“I couldn’t think what use I’d be in Antarctica, but at that stage I knew I could say yes to anything, knowing that I’d figure it out,” she said. So she went to her boss and asked if she could go to Antarctica.

“Well, would you go to China for me first?” he asked and she said “alright”.

So off she went to a university just south of Shanghai, where she taught Australian building codes through an interpreter. That done, she headed back to a training centre in New Zealand, where the team was trained up for Antarctica, preparation for working in extreme weather.

Her survival training from the army at home stood to her again. She helped with the logistics of getting from New Zealand to Antarctica before setting off on the expedition.

Now, Regina is back in the National College of Art and Design part-time, determined to get that arts degree that she missed first time round and working for Irish Rail.

She does not regret dropping out the first time because if she hadn’t, she would not have had all the wonderful experiences and opportunities she has had.

“See mistakes as opportunities and what you can make from them and ask for help from the professionals around you, you’ll figure it out, but that way you will figure it out quicker,” she said.