This is the transcript for the video Women in Engineering & IT Scholarships
Lucia Bautista 0:04
We’ll be talking about women and engineering and IT. We will be talking about engineering and IT scholarships at UTS. A little bit more about the application process, what it looks like and some advice. And at the end of the session, we’ll also have time for questions.
So when we think about women and engineering IT, I’d like to tell youa little bit more about the history of it. So women in engineering and IT is a unit, from the Faculty of Engineering IT and we have very long history, we’ve been around for 41 years, being these two longest running programme of its kind in Australia, and showing a lot of commitment from UTS toward gender equity. Women in Engineering IT is also big community of staff, students, industry, professionals, and alumni. We create elite social change, so that study and career journeys in engineering and IT are not limited by gender and this is very important. And one of the reasons why this is very important is because Engineering and IT professionals, design products, solutions, services that shape the way we live, the way we work, whether we study the way we move, the way we leave, we’re actually having this conversation, thanks to engineers and technologists.
So, because these disciplines are shaping so many, many aspects of our lives, if we want to design solutions that include everyone’s needs, we need to have in the room, those who are similar, but those who are different to us. We need engineering and technologists to be diverse innovators. The problem of not having diverse teams could be for example, that AI voice processes don’t identify women’s voices because they’ve been trained with male data and the same or similar issues are happening with face recognition solutions. If we take for example, car safety, for years cars have been designed using a car system based on the average male. This means that seat seatbelts, airbags were not designed for women bringing higher risks. So it’s very important that we can have different perspectives into the room.
No matter what discipline you decide to study, if you study engineering or technology, you will have the potential to make an impact and to change people’s lives. So congratulations for being here. And we look forward to meeting you. When you get into UTS, you will be welcomed by a great community from women in engineering and IT and also wanted to talk a bit about the programmes that we have. So we’re reached out to early primary schools to help build up the confidence of girls interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and working with teachers and parents as well. We also continue reaching into our high school to share so into high school to share what are the career opportunities in engineering and IT?
What are the emerging technologies that can make an impact, like drones, cybersecurity, or civil engineering, and how to make safer structures, for example. UTS students join these visits, industry professionals as well join us as mentors. But as you UTS students, you would have the possibility to inspire other girls and young women to follow engineering or IT professionals as well. Between high school and university, we have scholarships, this is something that we’ll be talking about today. And once you join UTS, as I mentioned before, you have a massive community that you can join from day one. And within this community, we have a lot of different social events, cultural celebrations and industry networking events as well. From the second year onwards, you can join the Lucy mentoring programme, where students are paired with industry mentors, for one on one mentoring for six months, and to get our guidance and advice on what your career could look like.
What are the roles out there? What’s the sectors that you could be interested in? And you can do all these with a guide or a mentor. And, as I mentioned before, again, we have a very, very strong community that can be your future network as well. We have a great community of gender equity ambassadors, which is a community of staff and students that are keen to keep developing their knowledge on diversity and inclusion and they join trainings, workshops, but also a lot of opportunities to contribute actively contribute to gender equity. So we look forward to seeing you in the future and welcome you all to our community. Now I’ll hand the mic over to our programme officer, programme and scholarship officer, Louisa Leong. Thanks, Lisa.
Louisa Leong 5:07
Thank you so much Lucia. As mentioned, I’m going to be talking diving into a little bit more about the scholarships that might be of interest to you. So the scholarships we’ll be talking about today include the WEIT cooperative scholarships available for all engineering degrees. We have the Bachelor of it Cooperative scholarships, specific to the Bachelor of IT programme and then we’ve got the FEIT WEIT which stands for Faculty of Engineering and IT Women in Engineering and IT, open to all engineering and IT programmes, including double degrees. So the WEIT cooperative scholarship is valued at $66,000 over four years. This includes three internships throughout your degree programme. This internship component is embedded in the Diploma of Professional Engineering Practice.
This is how it looks like in your five year degree programme, you’ll have your first internship at the end of your first year getting that real life experience early on. That’s a three months internships to get you started. And then you will have two six month internships in second and fourth year. And these internships will be with different industry partners so that you get the breadth of experience across different industries.
So, the second cooperative scholarship that we have is the Bachelor of Information Technology. And this is a three year scholarship of $49,500 in financial support, and it includes two six month industry placements. So, who might be the industry partners, these are some sponsors from the 2022 cohort. And you’ll see that there are a number of different companies across civil, electrical, mechanical software and data engineering. So this degree programme is very much the combination between business and IT. So if that’s more your interest, please apply for this one. Although we have multiple scholarships here, it doesn’t mean that you have to choose one, you’re most welcome to apply to all of them and then see how you go. Because then you have the chance to choose between different scholarships if you’re not quite sure which degree programme suits you just yet.
The third scholarship we have is the faculty scholarship for women in engineering and IT. This is a one year scholarship with $10,000 in financial support. So this is open to any degree programme in the Faculty of Engineering IT, computer science and also double degrees. So if you’re wanting to study a double degree, this is the only scholarship that’s available to you because double degrees are not eligible for the corporate of scholarships. Because of the internship components embedded into these degrees. We do have a range of other scholarships available. So please have a look at our website. Make sure you apply for everything that is applicable to you because you’ve got to be in it to get it. And if there aren’t scholarships for you now, once you arrive at university with us, we have scholarships for our current students. So make sure that you have a look as well. So you’ve heard a little bit about from me about the types of scholarships available. Now you can hear from our current students studying engineering and IT at UTS. So I’ll pass over to Mariah Taleb.
Mariah Taleb 8:21
Hello, thank you, Louisa. My name is Mariah and I am a final year biomedical engineering student at UTS. It’s so nice to have you guys attending this webinar. I myself am a scholarship recipient. I did the Canon medical systems scholarship. And it was just to promote women to go into the engineering workplace. So that was also one of my internships as well because if you’re doing engineering and if you’re doing IT as well, you have to do internships to complete your degree. So I chose biomedical engineering because I always wanted to put an impact assisting those in need with artificial devices such as cochlear implants, bionic eyes and prosthetics.
So my first internship, I did it at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, and I worked on so many devices and I commissioned over $10 million worth of medical devices, because I did it during COVID and it was at the beginning of COVID as well. So it was pretty hectic, but I learned so much and it got me ready for the workplace as well. So my second internship, which was the Canon medical systems internship was very different because I worked on massive large machines such as CT scans, MRIs, X-rays, ultrasounds, things like that. So it was really good even though I was the only female engineer in Canon medical. I felt like I was like, like, I felt really empowered because I knew I was leading the engineering workplace. And like the female, I was assisting people, young females into going into the engineering workplace as well, which was pretty cool.
Apart from that I have also been a part of the woman and engineering and IT community that Louisa and Lucia mentioned earlier. So I have been part of the Lucy mentoring programme and I have been a gender equity ambassador as well. And honestly, they were the best things I did during my UTS course, throughout my UTS course, I was able to build upon my leadership skills, my presentation skills, and also gain a lot of friends that have the same interest as me as well. Like going into engineering, you think you’re going to be the only girl doing engineering or the only girl doing technology, but the women in engineering, and it can really, it makes me feel so welcome. And you gained so many friends from it. So it’s really cool. And yeah, I was able to go to attend high schools and primary schools and actually motivate females to learn about engineering, a lot of them didn’t even know what engineering was. Or they thought, oh, you know, I need to do maths to do engineering, which is not true as well.
There’s a lot of programmes at UTS that you can also do such as like the UTS rocketry team where you build robots, rockets, and you launch them as well. And there’s also the UTS motorsports team as well, which I’m also part of, where we build autonomous cars, and we race against other universities.
Aiswarylakshmi Rajeev 11:34
So, now we’re going to move into a little bit about next steps just include just how to apply as well as any questions you guys may have. So a quick rundown of the key dates, so the scholarships open in around July, so you can check out for your scholarship eligibility on the 27th of August, when we have our Open Day. It’s a really good opportunity for you to come on campus, and really get to see the campus meet the people talk to some lecturers and really get an interest to like your areas as well as what the scholarship programme can do for you. The scholarship programme specifically closes in September, so definitely get your applications in before then.
And then after your HSC exams in December around when your ATARS are released is when your scholarship offers are also released. And then from December to March, we have multiple UAC offer rounds. So this is the rounds that you can change your preference for each round to receive offers in any course. So this really gives you the opportunity to apply to different degrees and really get the degree that you’re most suited for. But, for more specific dates, please consult our website as well. So in terms of application, so you need to complete the online written application form by the fourth of September to these programmes.
So for the Bachelor of Information Technology, it’s the BIT at the uts.edu.au website. And then for the WEIT one that we’re currently in, it’s the weit.uts.edu.au. Please check our website if you want more details, you can definitely see it has a wealth of knowledge there. Now in terms of application tips and tricks, so you guys are in luck, we have some tips and tricks in this webinar. So the main tip is really to be honest about your application. So include examples where possible, and any experiences which relate to the questions, they don’t have to be IT related, it can be anything from working in a school club to doing any volunteering experiences, such as peer support, you can also submit your application at time and register using the email address you have registered with UAC.
That’s a really important tip, don’t use your student email, you don’t have access to them after you graduate high school.
But yeah, and then in terms of the interview, so in order to get the scholarship, there’s a written application as well as an interview component as well. So after you pass a round for the written aspect, there’s a interview in September that you attend. So this interview will be with an industry sponsor, as well as a UTS representative. So these industry sponsors are those who sponsor your cohort coming in. So you saw a couple of them a bit earlier. But it’s a really good opportunity to kind of emulate that experience very early on in your careers. And in order your scholarship rank is calculated by your interview score, especially with your raw ATAR. So that’s how the scholarship is calculated.
In terms of interview tips, so we always emphasise, there’s no need to prepare, we just want to really know you so and it’s easier said than done. But truly it’s an opportunity where the interviewers will go through your application and really get to know what kind of experiences you’ve had and why you’re applying for the programme. So please review your written application. That’s where a lot of the questions come from as well, and try using the STAR approach. So this is, stands for Situation, Task, Action and Result. And the main reason that we suggest this is it’s really easy to get lost in your explanation, and really like ramble for a bit. So to get to the heart of your answers it really easy to go through your situation to provide context to your answer, what needed to be done. So that’s the task action, what did you do? What kind of role did you play? And then the result, what was the outcome of it? And that really gives us a nice holistic answer to the questions.
Now post the interview. So you do get a notification of your interview outcome, post your interview, so if not immediately after, after everyone gets to review it. So please review your UAC preferences you will be contacted after the eight hours are released to change them so that you can get offered. And please be ready to confirm if you’re accepting the scholarship as soon as possible, is really a first, it really is like a very small amount of people who get offered it. So if you choose not to accept, then there’ll be another person that we will need to contact and to receive a course offer from us, you need to list the scholarship course as your first preference before the UAC deadline as well. That’s a huge point.
And now adjustment points for the UAC round.
So points will be added to students raw ATAR marks to get at your selection rank. So your selection rank is what the uni utilises to give your degree and adjustment points here at UTS are capped at 13. And adjustment points can be given for a number of reasons. This includes completing the UTS Engineering and IT questionnaire, getting good results in relevant HSC subjects, your gender, special circumstances and more. So please check out our website for more details on these adjustment points.
Now creating gender equity adjustment factors. So recording Diversity Learning Environments for all, so from 2020 women, including cis and trans will be eligible to receive 10 adjustment factors for any degree or combined degree in the Faculty of Engineering and IT. So this is really our way to really push that gender equity gap that’s currently seen within the Engineering and IT market. For more information on this, please visit our FAQs and our website as well.
In terms of student support, so we have a lot of students are here at UTS. So you might know or you might not know that we actually don’t have any prerequisites for any of our degrees. But there are recommended knowledge that you do need at for some degrees. And in order for your we provide support for those students who haven’t had the chance to study those subjects. So there’s bridging courses offered in mathematics, physics and chemistry. For those who haven’t done it, there’s also U:PASS that’s available for most subjects as well. So this stands for peer assisted study success. And this is the opportunity for you to buddy up with someone who’s from an older year who’s already done that specific elective or subject and achieved a really high mark, and they get to tutor you as well, it’s a really good opportunity to kind of learn from other’s experiences. . And here’s also a contacts as well as really good opportunity, I would screenshot this, this is your chance to, in case you weren’t able to ask your questions within the session, you can always email us at the email on the screen, as well as our socials and our website.