Whilst attending the College for four-and-a-half years, I was hired as the on-site IT Specialist in my Sophomore year to manage the College Computer Room and diagnose and resolve any IT issue that either resident students or staff faced.

Upon graduating with a Bachelor of Arts with a double Major in English and Philosophy, I combined my degree with the IT experience gained from my College role to launch a career as a Major Incident and Problem Manager at a Tier 1 Australian Telecommunications and Cloud Services provider - where I was responsible for managing the resolution of the highest impact and most critical incidents, and the responsibility of diagnosing and resolving the most complex problems. I can safely say that angry calls from students about the College printer playing up prepared me well for the challenge of fixing Critical Incidents affecting thousands of services!

Following my time in telecommunications and Cloud, I moved into the Digital Payments space where I worked as a Service Delivery Manager for a multi-national FinTech who were the biggest payments provider in Europe. I was responsible for managing the Delivery and Operations of their largest Enterprise customers within Australia whilst also designing and implementing the end-to-end operational framework for a new digital payments platform which launched within the APAC region.

I have now moved to a Fortune 100 company who provide managed services where I am an Operations Manager – with a responsibility for ensuring end-to-end availability and stability of all production services and ensuring any disruptions to, or degradation of quality of, all services are either avoided or promptly resolved.

It truly was my first IT role at St John’s College that provided me with the skills I needed to succeed in my career. The technical issues that students faced were always varied and across a whole range of technologies. As such, my years working at the College taught me how to triage, diagnose, troubleshoot and resolve any issue on any technology using a consistent problem-solving methodology which can be applied to determine the root cause of any problem.

I am truly grateful for my formative years working at the College and for all my fellow students for constantly bombarding me with any and every IT issue they faced. Thank you, John’s!