CSC Australia Community Day
Every IBM Corporate Service Corps team has a Community Day Event where team members take a moment away from their projects to do something local for the community. For the CSC Australia 1 team, we did a networking event with students at the University of Queensland the evening of August 14!
The event was a fun evening of the fourteen CSC participants and representatives from IBM and ABV. The room was packed for the event with students from different majors in both undergrad and grad school.
The evening started with an IBM panel of our recently graduated members (in order of the picture below):
(1) Kira, from Germany — Senior Consultant, AI & Advanced Analytics
(2) Lynette, from Singapore — Senior Consultant
(3) Mick, from USA — Linux Cloud Engineer
(4) Karen, from Egypt — Technical Team Leader
Moderator: Steve, from USA — Principal Data Scientist
The panel was a great diverse range of our group and the students were mostly technical studies. This portion of the night involved Q&A with Steve (moderator) and from the students.
Moderated Questions included:
- Why did choose to work for IBM?
- Does your work relate to your degree?
- What’s a day in your job like?
Student Questions included:
- Is there an assessment for IBMers when they go from project to project?
- How do you find mentors and how does mentorship work at IBM?
- What do you recommend that students start now doing to develop skills and be more marketable in the market?
After the panel, we had networking time with food and soda/water! The CSC group split up on different topics and students came to speak to the IBMers in topics they were interested in. I was part of Data Science talking about Business Intelligence and Analytics. Other topics were on our RFDS and WWF CSC projects, Open Source, Applying for IBM jobs, and Project Management.
Overall it was a great event and day! Working out of UQ reminded me about the academic environment. I felt inspired and refreshed throughout the day. I enjoyed talking to the students about the accomplishments they already done, their career aspirations, and “off-topic conversations” on current events and new technologies.
Earlier in the day, the RFDS IBM CSC Data team (Navneet, Steve, and I) met with the student group working with RFDS Queensland on a different, but data related project. Students volunteer to work with local organizations outside of their classwork on tech-skill related projects. We had a productive hour meeting talking about RFDS and the use of data in the organization. Although out of scope on our project, it was great to spend time collaborating and learning about each other’s projects. Shoutout to University of Queensland ilab Accelerator for hosting!
