She was the only girl in her group at primary school who did woodwork on Friday afternoons at St Gerard's School in Bray, Co Wicklow. "It was more fun than anything else," she says. "We made small pieces - tea-pot stands, bird tables, little tables. I suppose that's what triggered off my interest."

Today Ruth Cahir works as a furniture technologist and an assistant designer at a manufacturing plant in Monaghan town. Her duties include making the prototypes, preparing detail drawings and cutting lists and liaising with the production manager and the foreman. She works at the McNally & Finlay plant where furniture is produced. Her work is largely done on AutoCAD, the computer-aided design system.

"They make mainly cherry and mahogany furniture," Cahir explains. "A white oak range is about to be launched and there's a new solid pine furniture range for the Irish market."

Her work involves helping to "prepare products prior to production - we have a set product range."

Cahir had no strong career ideas at school. It was only in her final year that she decided to apply to Galway-Mayo IT to do the furniture course at the campus in Letterfrack, Co Galway. As the January CAO deadline approached in her Leaving Cert year in 1994, she was still undecided, thinking about architecture, photography or auctioneering.

"I was well into the year and I hadn't decided what I was going to do. I was interested in a career in the technical-creative area.

Even though she had not studied woodwork at second-level, Cahir had "life drawings, design drawings, bits of pottery, a bit of photography - I suppose they could tell I was visually aware."

"It was my mother and my career teacher, Mrs Markham, who discovered the course in Letterfrack. I went down for an interview and I brought my portfolio."

She liked the place on sight. "It was so unique down there. It's so isolated and remote. The sea was there . . . it's out in Connemara, near Clifden."

Starting in Letterfrack was "very daunting," she says. "You have this small campus with over 100 students. You get to know all your classmates. You have a good relationship with all your lecturers. I did find it very tough at the beginning because of my background without woodwork, but I loved it.

"It's quite technical and practical. I wanted something that was more lateral. I was fed-up with theory."

In first year there were 20 students, five of them female. Cahir learned to turn the wood, to make all sorts of joints, to do marquetry, to make dove-tail drawers and to put on a veneer.

"It was great to be able to take the wood and transform it, to plane it down, cut its sides, joint it, sand it down and apply a finish and bring up the grain."

She completed a two-year national certificate in furniture design and manufacture, and decided to carry on and study for a degree. It was then that her science and maths in the Leaving Cert stood to her, she says.

The course changed from being largely practical to being very technical and theoretical. "It was all academic, there was very little practical. We did CAD, production, quality, materials, science. We covered such a wide spectrum - it was very comprehensive. It was tough."

As part of her work experience, she spent 10 weeks working in Klimmeck & Henderson in Dublin, where they make large once-off pieces such as reception tables and conference tables.

She then spent 10 weeks working in Finland. "It was a great experience," she says. "I was involved in design. The style was quite different - it was a big eye-opener. The timbers were different. There was a lot of birch and beech."

She returned to college in September and graduated with a first-class honours B Sc in furniture technology in 1998.