Adrian Pelczar: Summer Placement 2026
"My summer placement at Trigon was a great introduction to work in an engineering consultancy and gave me the opportunity to experience the role of a fire engineer across a wide range of projects. From the outset, the team were incredibly approachable and always willing to help. They encouraged me to get the most out of the placement, while also pushing me to step outside my comfort zone and take on more responsibility as my confidence developed.
Throughout the placement, I was trusted to manage my own workload and balance several projects at once, which I found much more engaging than working on a single project for a longer period. The team regularly checked in to make sure I was not overloaded and also made an effort to involve me in projects and activities that matched my interests, including client meetings and more technical design work. The placement also helped me develop my technical writing and communication skills through reports, fee proposals, client interactions and the opportunity to deliver a CPD presentation to an architectural practice.
I was surprised by how quickly I became involved in live project work, contributing to a project on my very first day. As fire engineering was relatively new to me, I naturally had plenty of questions, but the team was always supportive and happy to explain concepts or discuss my work.
My work included drafting fee proposals, carrying out drawing mark-ups, reviewing architectural design iterations from a fire safety perspective and identifying provisions such as travel distances, compartmentation requirements and occupancy limits. I worked across a variety of building types, including repair garages, blocks of flats, detached houses and offices, with project briefs ranging from fit-outs to new building developments. This helped me understand how projects are scoped and priced, as well as where a fire engineer’s responsibilities sit within the wider design process.
I also had the opportunity to attend meetings with architects and other members of the design team. These gave me a much better understanding of the level of influence a fire engineer can have on a design, particularly during the early stages, and highlighted the importance of collaboration between disciplines. Site visits were equally valuable, helping me better relate technical drawings to the buildings themselves and understand practical considerations that are not always obvious on paper.
Alongside live project work, I undertook a research project focused on verifying an external fire spread calculator used internally by Trigon. This involved exploring concepts from software engineering, including verification and validation, and researching best practice for spreadsheet verification. I reviewed BR 187 to understand how external fire spread calculations were carried out and used the research work to help develop a general framework that could be adapted for checking other engineering calculators in the future.
Another project I had the opportunity to work on was a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model investigating smoke movement and tenability within a multi-storey atrium building. I compared different soot yields and mesh sizes to understand how modelling assumptions affected smoke spread, visibility and temperature predictions. The project gave me a much better appreciation of both the value and limitations of CFD, and allowed me to explore ways of presenting and interpreting results for real building scenarios.
The Wednesday CPD lunches were another valuable part of the placement, exposing me to topics that I would not typically encounter through regular project work. The sessions created an open forum for discussing unfamiliar subjects, new or changing legislation, and experiences from past and ongoing projects. They were a great opportunity to pick up both small insights and more substantial pieces of knowledge that developed my wider understanding of fire safety and often prompted me to consider whether anything discussed could be applied to the projects I was working on.
Overall, my time at Trigon allowed me to apply and further develop the engineering skills I had gained at university while building confidence in a professional environment. The combination of meaningful project responsibility, technical variety and support from the team made the placement an extremely valuable experience and I am looking forward to taking everything I learnt at Trigon into my final year at university."