Hear that huge, shuddering bang? Ah, they say in TCD, that's just another one of Prichard's explosions. The students and staff in the university's department of civil, structural and environmental engineering occasionally hear a series of almighty thuds at half-hourly intervals. They know that Sarah Prichard is working in the lab again.

Dressed in her off-white boiler suit and hard hat, she is testing the strength of concrete by dropping large weights of steel on to it. "When it drops it shakes the building," says the young civil engineer with a smile. She wanted to spend some time doing research before she took up work in the "real" world working with a commercial company. Now, as she comes to the end of her doctoral work, she's setting her sights on a challenging job with a structural engineering consultancy group which does work on "innovative buildings".

"In school I was always into mathematics but the decision to be an engineer came much, much later," she recalls. While she was in fifth year at Dublin's Alexandra College she attended an open day in UCD. She'd already been to the talks on arts, history and law. "Then I went to an introductory lecture on engineering. It was really, really exciting. Up to then I had always wanted to be a historian."

Engineering, she realised, was about "how things worked and you were going to be building things and you'd be contributing to the 21st century and the future. Engineering is responsible for huge amounts of developments."

She chose a course in TCD because the first two years were general and, as undergraduates, they would have two years before they had to make a decision and choose between mechanical, civil, electronic or computer engineering. "At that stage," she recalls, "you don't know. So I went into civil engineering and we were given a really good broad base to make an informed opinion".

Engineering for Prichard is now about taking buildings to the next level. Up to now they have been "functional and practical", she believes. "Now we have to take them to the next level and minimise their impact on the surrounding environment."

After completing the first two years of her degree programme she decided to specialise in structural engineering. On graduation in 1996, she decided to do her PhD. For the past three years she has been studying the "response of confined concrete to hard impact". She chose this area in order to study how to make concrete, which "breaks and shatters" if a plane or a train crashes into it, for example, or if there is an explosion. "We've a sleeve of steel around the concrete," she explains. In the lab there are hydraulic actuators, not to mention 82 kilo weights of concrete which are dropped, travelling at eight metres per second.

"Then I get the results and I go away and analyse them and do theoretical work on a computer to try and predict how the steel and the concrete will react.

"It's not enough to know engineering but engineering is constantly challenging. I've got to push myself into knowing loads of other stuff as well as engineering."

Her work is being funded by the Trinity Foundation. She arrives at 8.30 a.m. each morning and "I leave well after six. I've about six months to go."

Her work to date has been "really tough. It's a huge challenge and I feel I've worked harder than I would have worked in a regular job. In this work I'm my own boss. I'm responsible for my own work and it's a huge challenge. What I'm doing is very much work."

There have been days "when you want to shoot yourself," she says, adding, "I've no regrets. It's surpassed my every expectation. Engineering really is cooool."