Meet Melissa Thein, a third-year mechatronics engineering student, intern at Siemen's Mobility and executive member of UNSW's Women in Engineering Society. She also works as a hockey coach and taekwondo coach. Read on to see how Melissa balances work, life and university during a typical week!
Sundays will always be the first day of the week in my heart. I usually spend them relaxing with family or catching up on any work. It's a day to reset and set the mood for the upcoming week.
I'm part of the safety assurance team at Siemens Mobility, currently working on the Sydney Metro Western Sydney Airport project. Our job is to identify risks/hazards and figure out how to mitigate them, very interesting stuff! I've only just started here (this week was my second week!), so I spent my time familiarising myself with engineering standards and the process of assuring safety.
After work, I head home to have dinner before attending some WIESoc meetings. As Vice President of Programs in WIESoc, I oversee the Protégé Program team as well as the Industry Mentoring Program (IMP) team. The first meeting tonight is with my Protégé Program directors. The Protégé Program is our first-year peer mentoring program and we discuss an upcoming event.
Right after that, I'll attend the executive meeting where we provide updates to each other on the work we’re doing.
Get ready for a long day… I wake up at 5:40am for hockey training before heading into uni for a day of electrical circuit design. First is the workshop, where we go through some questions on the week's content and have a short quiz. After lunch, it's off to the electrical labs to physically apply the concepts we've learnt. Finally, I go down to Village Green for a round of social sports, our team is playing volleyball this term!
Back to the Siemens office today with some more onboarding tasks. I learnt about cybersecurity and how to stay safe from hackers. Being International Women's Day, there was a lot of content about celebrating influential women in the field which was very empowering.
After work, it's time to coach my team's hockey game.
Thursday is another Siemens day – full of spreadsheets, hazards and diagrams! You'd be surprised at how seriously they take rats! I create a graph to help work out the severity of hazards in the metro system using software that I had never heard of called Visio, a Microsoft program just like Word.
Thursday evening is when all of the Protégé Program's events run. There wasn't one this week, but next week I’ll be working behind the scenes to help my team support first-year women in engineering students.
Using a different side of my brain today, I go to uni to attend my French tutorial. My tutor insists that no English be used in the classroom, so it is definitely a very different vibe. After this, I squeeze in a quick meeting with my IMP team before heading off to teach taekwondo to little kids.
Another shift of taekwondo coaching, and I finally get some time to reflect and relax.
For more information about studying mechatronics engineering at UNSW, see the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering study areas.