Yuwei Liu - Strategy and Investment Manager of a Fortune 500 company (formerly senior consultant at Strategy&)

After I graduated in Janurary 2017 in MSc New and Renewable Energy, I joined the Innovative Leadership Programme in Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC). It was a two-year graduate rotation programme, where I worked on projects across multiple professional services. After that I was promoted to be a senior strategy M&A consultant at Strategy& (part of PwC network), and mainly focused on new and renewable energy and automation industries. Since mid 2020, I moved to another Fortune 500 company based at Guangdong China to take the Strategy and Investment Manager position.

In the first two years of my career, industries in new and renewable energy were developing fast in China, while not many consultancy firms had sufficient expertise in this area. Apart from self-learning of professional skills, I found that the MSc course and the network I built when I studied at Durham had provided me particular advantages which helped me to be competitive and to achieve more in my consultant career.

MSc course modules offered like Energy Markets, Renewable Energy, Low Carbon and Thermal Technology strengthened my understanding in new and renewable energy. Various extra curriculum activities offered me chances to practise social networking skills. The most useful thing to me was that we had Engineering alumni came to do recruitment seminars to share their working experience. The alumni I met were all friendly and they were willing to help us in terms of referring job or internship opportunities. From these seminars I learnt that Durham graduates have very good reputation in many companies. MSc graduates from Engineering are also very competitive for consultancy job opportunities which are not necessarily engineering related, as long as we can demonstrate ability to learn new knowledge fast - an ability we practised a lot while studying our MSc course. 

(October 2021)