Scholarship ignites Deakin student’s engineering career

Bell Post Hill resident Nevenka Ilicic has been awarded a $10,000 scholarship to study engineering at Deakin University.

Nevenka was awarded the IGNITED – Initiative for a Girls' Network in Information Technology and Engineering @ Deakin – scholarship after achieving an ENTER of 86.8 in her final year at Clonard College. She is now studying a double degree, Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Commerce, at Deakin.

The scholarship of $10,000 and academic mentoring will help Nevenka with her study costs and give her an upper hand when she graduates.

Whilst Nevenka is only in her first year at Deakin, she is looking to combine all her skills in her future career.

"I would like to have a role in management in the field of engineering. I'm not sure if there are many girls in these roles, but this is something I am interested in," she said.

IGNITED aims to redress an imbalance in the number of males and females in the engineering and IT industries. In Australia, women currently account for less than 25 per cent of IT graduates and less than 15 per cent of engineering graduates. Through the program, Deakin aims to attract more high performing female students to these areas of study.

The head of Deakin's School of Engineering and Information Technology, Professor Kate Smith-Miles, said the industries were facing a serious shortage of women.

"It is really critical that we encourage more high achieving female students to consider engineering and IT degrees. Women represent 50 per cent of the population, and given the growing skills shortages in these industries, we cannot continue to have women so under-represented in the workforce," she said.

"The interesting thing is that when women do embark on careers in engineering and IT, they are usually very successful, working their way into management roles very quickly. This is possibly due to the extra non-technical skills that women are often very good at, such as communication, team work, relationship building, project management."