Philippines | Freyja Miguel

Meet Freyja 

Seeking a fun and challenging adventure, Freyja followed in her sister’s footsteps by pursuing her Masters degree in Sydney. As a recent graduate with a BS Electronics Engineering from Mapúa University, she was attracted to the UTS Master of Engineering (ME) in Computer Control Engineering and Master of Engineering Management (MEM).

To Freyja’s surprise, she received not only one but two scholarships to UTS! Learn more about scholarships available to international students at UTS.

“I had two partial scholarships for my first semester at UTS. One was for academic performance during my undergrad, while the other was for students from certain countries (which included the Philippines). I was just expecting one scholarship but got offered two!”

Freyja took full advantage to get her hands dirty at UTS’ top-notch facilities like the Mechatronics Engineering Lab and Protospace—Australia’s most advanced 3D printing and scanning facility.

“I loved working on projects that involved hardware. It was fun--I honed my skills and built cool stuff! I accessed the mechatronics lab to use robotic arms, a laser cutter, and 3D printers for my engineering graduate project. Titled, Learning Models to Improve the 3D Pose Estimation of a Capsule Robot with an Array of Arc-Shaped Permanent Magnets, it was an experimental validation of previous theoretical research on the 3 Degrees of Freedom localization for a capsule robot using a rotating magnetic field.”

UTS also offered Freyja opportunities to gain real world work experience before graduating. Inspired by UTS Associate Professor Jaime Valls Miro while studying an Advanced Robotics subject, Freyja worked with robots as a Research Scholar and as a User Interface Designer at the Robotics Institute. She also gained valuable experience as a Junior Python Developer at Fasade, a company founded by UTS Startups.

“The UTS Startups community gave helpful insights and support for entrepreneurship. Although I hadn’t gotten to a stage where I would run my own startup, it was definitely worth getting involved. The experiences helped me hone not only my technical skills, but also my project management skills and communication skills.“

Through a UTS classmate, Freyja found out about her current employer, Movandi.

For the job interview, they liked how hands-on I was in engineering—having several projects within and outside of the uni. I mentioned the smart farm project from my Advanced Sensor Networks class and my engineering graduate project. It also helped that one of the interviewers took the same class and had a similar project.

Today, Freyja is a Staff RF Test Engineer at Movandi a Sydney based company specialising in the design and development of 5G technology. Her job duties include testing 5G mm wave systems where she sets up the hardware, develops Python code for testing and automation, post-processing data, and preparing reports. She also manages the Sydney Radio Frequency Lab—looking after instrumentation and setups, and ordering and organising lab equipment.