Ameera Ali gave us the lowdown on what she gets up to during a day as a Level 4 Acoustic Technician Apprentice in our London team.
I wake up early so that I can get ready for the day ahead and, importantly, have my breakfast before heading to work. Once I arrive at the office, the first task on my mental to-do list is to check any emails that have come through. This morning, we have an enquiry to prepare a proposal for a noise survey in Wickford, South Essex.
We’re also off to site to set up a noise survey for a residential scheme, so I prepare the kit, plan our transport, establish the noise monitoring locations and prepare our risk assessment. Once we’ve got all that ready, it’s time to head to site! We pack the heavy kit into the car and make sure we’ve a good playlist setup for the stereo as the journey is pretty long.
After a long drive, we arrive at the site in Wickford in typical British weather… Ensuring we’re well wrapped up and wearing all the required PPE (High-vis vest and steel safety boots), we hike into the forest with the kit to reach our first monitoring location.
For this site, we’ve got to work our way around to set up three monitoring locations. At the first location next to a trainline, we set up the vibration kit and a noise logger, chaining both kits to a tree to prevent the risk of theft. The second location is in the middle of the site, but this spot only requires one noise logger, so we set up quite quickly and secure it. Finally, we install one noise logger at the last location, secure it and make our way back to the car.
Next we grab some lunch as we travel back to our office near to London’s Borough Market and chat about what else we have planned for the week ahead. Once we’re back, I write up all the notes on the survey, including noting things like the weather conditions and any dominant noise sources that could cause disturbances in the data.
After that, I head home. I note down what I have done during the day and try to plan for the week ahead and I also have a quick look at some of my assignments from London South Bank University, making sure I’m aware of future deadlines and workloads in the coming weeks.
