A student reflects on establishing a career in Traffic and Transport Planning - a podcast by ITLS

Tyler O’Hare is in his final semester of a civil engineering degree at Monash. He was on the organising committee of a Student Leadership Summit held recently in Melbourne.

Tyler’s experience, his reflections on his degree and the ways in which he is striving to expand his network and understanding of what is involved in traffic engineering and transport planning are an interesting case study on how young people are creating a future in our profession.

Tyler is doing an engineering degree but finds he is not “super interested in structures and water”. The Civil course has no specific transport stream although they do a few subjects such as road design including horizontal and vertical elevation. There are some elective subjects and Tyler has used these to dig deeper into the transport engineering field.

There are a couple of other ways Tyler found activities that broadened his experience:

“In one of my subjects earlier this year I was actually in combination with Vic Roads. We did a massive assignment based on their whole “movement and place” principle which opened my eyes and opened the eyes of the students to focus not just on cars running down the road but making the roads a place for pedestrians and a place for cyclists to be involved as well”.

At Monash a lot of people who are doing civil engineering are doing a double degree. Some of the subjects include architecture, sciences, law and the arts.

Tyler said “I'm working on a major project at the moment with an architecture student who's doing civil engineering and architecture as a double degree. He's probably focused on going more down the architecture stream but it's awesome to talk to him and get his understanding of how the fields differ, which is really cool”.

Like most students Tyler is looking to expand his network of contacts, and events run by AITPM and ITE are very helpful. The most productive step in getting a broader understanding of traffic and transport was having people he could firstly relate to and then that can lead to mentoring.

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