My role at NAB is working within the Digital Insights team as a Software Engineer. This involves data, data, and more data. Analysing it, cleaning it, organising it. We look a lot at digitally activity, for example, how customers interact with different online services. We also work closely with the adoption and marketing teams to make better informed decisions about products and services offered. We also maintain digital dashboards and handle a lot of database management.

Lily completed her placement at National Australia Bank (NAB) in the Digital Insights team.

I believe in physics it’s very easy to be steered down the academic pathway and easy to forget there is a whole workforce out there looking for students with the skills you have.

This placement has definitely solidified the fact that wherever I end up I want to be in a dynamic environment, where the work is constantly changing, and I want to work with large amounts of data. I’m sure as the year progresses, I will have more insights to my future path, but right now I’m just enjoying the work I’m doing.

  • "The professional placement component of this degree was the reason I picked Swinburne in the first place. As a mature age student, I did have the luxury of being able to pick my degree because I wasn’t reliant on my ATAR, so the opportunity to get out of the classroom really appealed to me.”

    Lily , Bachelor of Engineering

Even if you don’t enter the industry world after placement, the skills you learn are going to carry you far in whatever field you choose. It’s also really good to mix things up. Having been in a university environment for 6 years, a break from the classroom is more than welcome. And, not going to lie, getting paid actual money for once is amazing! 

I have one year of study left to go. Third year is a big one because it involves a capstone project which is basically a mini-honours. I’m hoping I can work with the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing (CAS) at Swinburne to complete a project in astronomy, but I think I’d like to look more at the data side of things. There’s a lot of data in astronomy just waiting to be played with!

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