A springboard for high-flyers in tech careers
Each year the Faculty of Engineering and the Board of Studies of IT, at the University of Malta, open their doors to engineers, ICT specialists, industry, prospective students, parents, and to the public to display the projects carried out by the final...
Each year the Faculty of Engineering and the Board of Studies of IT, at the University of Malta, open their doors to engineers, ICT specialists, industry, prospective students, parents, and to the public to display the projects carried out by the final year students under the supervision of the academic staff.
This year, the Final Year Engineering Projects Exhibition will mark its eleventh anniversary while the Information Technology Students' Projects Exhibition will mark its eighth one.
The thrilling engineering projects cover a wide range of engineering disciplines, ranging from computer simulations to test jig implementations, while ICT projects cover inventive applications to business software, signal processing, e-commerce and wireless networking.
This work is considered as being the best achievement of the students during their course as it gives a clear indication of their individual potential. Evidently, some of this potential has been realised, for alumni who exhibited their projects a few years ago are now in high-flying careers in Malta and abroad.
I-Tech spoke to two of these former students who recounted their university days and shared their experience of the leap from being a student to having a dream career.
"As an engineering student, my life on campus was quite energetic, particularly during the final year dissertation," remembers Julian Buhagiar, 31. His electrical engineering degree (final year) project consisted of Maltese-based speech recognition software capable of understanding users in native spoken Maltese, to be used in such machines as bank ATMs. The project was a lasting success, with a number of follow-up projects in subsequent years to further build on the concept.
Nine years after exhibiting his project and graduating, Mr Buhagiar continues to be a high-flyer. He is now director of product management with a telecommunications software consultancy firm based in London.
Living between London and Malta, he manages a business unit consisting of product managers, programmers and salesmen. His day-to-day tasks include creating, marketing and selling products and services to global telecommunications customers such as Sky, Telefonica and Virgin. Additionally, his tasks include determining future global market trends in telecommunications as well as establishing new technology requirements.
Previously he had work experience with Go Mobile and Vodafone Malta.
"Despite initial impressions that dissertations and examinations were merely a gating process to enable students to progress from one year to the next, one lasting experience that has definitely been indispensable in the working world is the ability to rationalise problems within a very short period of time, and to understand their underlying common patterns; more importantly, how to take the lessons learnt from one task and adapt them to solve the next," insists Mr Buhagiar. "In this respect, the working world can be seen merely as an ever-changing set of self-tests, each one presenting more rewards, if successful."
Mr Buhagiar is now reading for his doctorate in engineering, and to date has published articles in various scientific and engineering papers.
Another high achiever is Keith Sacco who obtained a BSc in Information Technology from the Faculty of Science in 2001. In his final year, he specialised in computer information systems. His thesis focused mainly on geographic information systems and how these could support spatial planning in Malta.
"One interesting project that some other students and I worked on during the undergraduate course was the rendering of a 3D representation of Mnajdra temples. It actually involved carefully measuring the megaliths," Mr Sacco told i-Tech when describing his university days.
Mr Sacco continued his studies and in 2004 successfully completed a master's degree in business administration, specialising in e-business. His research included the analysis, design and prototyping of a browser-based executive information management system for a telecommunications service provider.
Recently he was granted an engineering warrant.
Mr Sacco is currently employed with Atlas Technology Group (Malta) Ltd as a programme/project manager. This multi-national company provides custom, outsourced application software services for clients with large IT functions worldwide. Some of the more recent projects that he has managed include dealing with developers in the UK and Las Vegas, where he was asked to develop and deploy a multi-platform monitoring system in a major telecommunications company in Japan and the US. Other projects include corporate website development, internal IT systems and VOIP solutions for the organisation.
Prior to Atlas Technology Group, Mr Sacco worked within the Maltacom Group and Vodafone Malta.
The Engineering and IT Final Year Projects Exhibitions will be open to the public on July 5 and 6 between 5 and 8 p.m. The Engineering Exhibition is also open on July 7 between 9 a.m. and 12.30 p.m.
More information is available at www.eng.um.edu.mt/exhibition2007
This year, the Final Year Engineering Projects Exhibition will mark its eleventh anniversary while the Information Technology Students' Projects Exhibition will mark its eighth one.
The thrilling engineering projects cover a wide range of engineering disciplines, ranging from computer simulations to test jig implementations, while ICT projects cover inventive applications to business software, signal processing, e-commerce and wireless networking.
This work is considered as being the best achievement of the students during their course as it gives a clear indication of their individual potential. Evidently, some of this potential has been realised, for alumni who exhibited their projects a few years ago are now in high-flying careers in Malta and abroad.
I-Tech spoke to two of these former students who recounted their university days and shared their experience of the leap from being a student to having a dream career.
"As an engineering student, my life on campus was quite energetic, particularly during the final year dissertation," remembers Julian Buhagiar, 31. His electrical engineering degree (final year) project consisted of Maltese-based speech recognition software capable of understanding users in native spoken Maltese, to be used in such machines as bank ATMs. The project was a lasting success, with a number of follow-up projects in subsequent years to further build on the concept.
Nine years after exhibiting his project and graduating, Mr Buhagiar continues to be a high-flyer. He is now director of product management with a telecommunications software consultancy firm based in London.
Living between London and Malta, he manages a business unit consisting of product managers, programmers and salesmen. His day-to-day tasks include creating, marketing and selling products and services to global telecommunications customers such as Sky, Telefonica and Virgin. Additionally, his tasks include determining future global market trends in telecommunications as well as establishing new technology requirements.
Previously he had work experience with Go Mobile and Vodafone Malta.
"Despite initial impressions that dissertations and examinations were merely a gating process to enable students to progress from one year to the next, one lasting experience that has definitely been indispensable in the working world is the ability to rationalise problems within a very short period of time, and to understand their underlying common patterns; more importantly, how to take the lessons learnt from one task and adapt them to solve the next," insists Mr Buhagiar. "In this respect, the working world can be seen merely as an ever-changing set of self-tests, each one presenting more rewards, if successful."
Mr Buhagiar is now reading for his doctorate in engineering, and to date has published articles in various scientific and engineering papers.
Another high achiever is Keith Sacco who obtained a BSc in Information Technology from the Faculty of Science in 2001. In his final year, he specialised in computer information systems. His thesis focused mainly on geographic information systems and how these could support spatial planning in Malta.
"One interesting project that some other students and I worked on during the undergraduate course was the rendering of a 3D representation of Mnajdra temples. It actually involved carefully measuring the megaliths," Mr Sacco told i-Tech when describing his university days.
Mr Sacco continued his studies and in 2004 successfully completed a master's degree in business administration, specialising in e-business. His research included the analysis, design and prototyping of a browser-based executive information management system for a telecommunications service provider.
Recently he was granted an engineering warrant.
Mr Sacco is currently employed with Atlas Technology Group (Malta) Ltd as a programme/project manager. This multi-national company provides custom, outsourced application software services for clients with large IT functions worldwide. Some of the more recent projects that he has managed include dealing with developers in the UK and Las Vegas, where he was asked to develop and deploy a multi-platform monitoring system in a major telecommunications company in Japan and the US. Other projects include corporate website development, internal IT systems and VOIP solutions for the organisation.
Prior to Atlas Technology Group, Mr Sacco worked within the Maltacom Group and Vodafone Malta.
The Engineering and IT Final Year Projects Exhibitions will be open to the public on July 5 and 6 between 5 and 8 p.m. The Engineering Exhibition is also open on July 7 between 9 a.m. and 12.30 p.m.
More information is available at www.eng.um.edu.mt/exhibition2007