Engineering student takes second place at local IET competition
Mona Ruan, an honours student at the Faculty of Engineering, came in second place at the local IET ‘Present around the World’ competition, a global competition for young professionals and students within engineering to develop and showcase their presentation skills.
“One of the volunteers who helps run the competition came to one of my lectures to talk about the event. I decided to enter as I wanted to get feedback on my presentation skills, which is something I really enjoy working on.”
The local competition was held at Te Aro campus in April this year. Mona had to give a 10 minute presentation. The judging was based on both presentation skills and technical content.
“I was nervous because I joined the competition on my own so I didn’t know anyone else. But when it came to presenting, I think it went so fast I didn’t really have time to panic!”
Mona’s presentation covered a topic she had learnt about earlier in the year: the past, present and future of Infrastructure as a Service and Cloud technology (IaaS).
“IaaS is the abstraction of hardware systems that are needed to host services, such as websites. It means that users can sign up to an IaaS provider and request a virtual machine to host their website without ever needing to physically handle the servers. This simplifies the process on the users end.
“I went to the competition to gain experience with presentations and public speaking. The placing was a really nice bonus. I think it is great that these competitions are offered and advertised throughout university because they teach soft skills which are hard to learn in a lecture theatre but absolutely important in the workforce. These events are also places for networking and meeting potential employers.”