Summer School inspires Volunteer - Andrew Botros
Andrew Botros, an award winning software engineer and researcher with Cochlear Limited, says it was taking part in the Sydney Division's Honeywell Engineering Summer School in 2004 that got him hooked on volunteering.
Botros said the summer school, an intensive week-long program that gives NSW and ACT students entering their final year of high school a behind-the-scenes look at engineering, was so inspiring he joined Engineers Australia just to support the initiative!
"I was amazed at what the school offered students, and the fact they were being given such a great insight into the diversity of engineering. The school shows students engineers at work and allows them to talk at length with people in the industry.
"When I take students at the school on a site tour of Cochlear they see engineers bent over microscopes, designing and building intricate devices for deaf people. They see that engineering can be about more than construction."
To date, Botros has been Cochlear's representative at three Honeywell summer schools, and has also taken the public on guided tours of Cochlear's head office in Lane Cove in Sydney as part of National Engineering Week. Last year Botros took 60 people on a tour of the biomedical company and showed them not only engineers at work, but hearing implants being manufactured by hand.
Botros said volunteering with Engineers Australia gave him a sense of professional balance. "Volunteering allows me to give something of myself to my discipline. Australian engineering is of an incredibly high standard, and Cochlear is a great example of that. I want to let school kids know engineering offers an enormous range of disciplines and that they can make a real difference to someone's quality of life."
Andrew Botros graduated from the University of New South Wales in 2001 with degrees in computer engineering and biomedical engineering. His final year project, ‘The Virtual Flute', was a computer analysis that discovered alternative sounds and fingering techniques.
On graduating, Andrew joined Cochlear Limited and designed Cochlear's AutoNRTTM, a system that automatically analyses auditory nerve activity with the Nucleus® FreedomTM implant, an industry first. Prizes include the New South Wales University Medal for engineering and the Siemens Prize for Innovation. He was named Engineers Australia's Young Professional Engineer of the Year in 2006.
