Careers and employability were in the spotlight at Macquarie University’s first-ever Engineering Student Employability Conference (ESEC) on 23 November 2022.
The conference was a new and exciting initiative, allowing students to gather career insights from engineering industry experts, student alumni, Engineers Australia, and the Employability & Graduate Success team. The ESEC gave engineering industry organisations the opportunity to showcase their brand, promote employment/ internship roles directly to our engineering students and network with academics in the School. Associate Professors Michael Hitchens, Ray Eaton and Linda Beaumont also shared career stories and highlighted the Faculty of Science & Engineering’s commitment to developing students’ career readiness and confidence, whichever path they may want to take as engineers.
Despite being held the week after exams, almost 100 students eagerly attended targeted discipline sessions delivered by companies such as Atlassian, InfoSys, Endeavour Energy, Stantec, Transport for NSW, CSIRO, Department of Defence, Aurecon, Northrop, and Nokia. The sessions were hosted by engineering academics Dr Nazmul Huda, Associate Professor Ray Eaton (Dean of School of Engineering), Dr Rex Di Bona and Professor Subhas Mukhopadhuyay. Engineers Australia and the Employability and Graduate Success team delivered sessions to the students outlining the best tips and tricks on how to build their employability journey.
Students also enjoyed networking and visiting the industry stalls, and many stopped by the student advising and GLP stalls. To enhance the student’s professional profile a ‘LinkedIn photo booth’ was also made available to those who could squeeze it in.
The ESEC was capped off with a fantastic alumni panel, featuring John Georgaklis, Nour Manafikhi, Nusrat Binte Nijam, and William Hua speaking about their learnings and discussing valuable topics like top trends in the industry and empowering women in the field of engineering.
Lunch and networking proved the perfect way to end the conference, with all the partners excited to have met and spoken to our enthusiastic and highly motivated students. This was a collaborative event involving the wonderful Faculty of Science and Engineering Student Experience team, academics and the Employability and Graduate Success team. We have no doubt the conference will become a regular way to connect our students, academics and industry in the future.
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