Austin Fraser-Hills: Construction Project Management Student
Austin: I’ve always been interested in the building side of things, whether designing or actually building it. From that then I decided the management side was the better option, you still get to be with the architects, you get to learn all the design stuff but every other trade as well, whether its trades, consultants, engineers, everything like that, and just sounded far more interesting to me, and more challenging as well.
There’s heaps of different jobs that students can get into when you do the degree. Theres the biggest range you can possibly think of. The highlight of uni so far would probably have to be we pretty much got to go and build a house in Cambodia as a subject, and that was pretty cool for us.
I’ve sorta been thrown straight into the deep end with my job and at the moment I’ve only been there for eight months now, but I’m actually site managing four different projects at once. So its pretty busy, pretty stressful but its really good, its probably the best way to learn.
It is, its a little bit tough to be honest, it sort of shocked me when I first started doing it, but all it takes is very simple time management. You’ve got to really separate you work and your uni work, and you’ve just got to make sure that when you say you’re going to do something that you actually do it.
The toughest challenge would probably be the group work. The course is, theres not very many individual assignments but I think they obviously do it for a reason, because when you’re out in the workforce, if you’re a project manager you need to manage people and you’re managing the whole process.
[Copyright 2015 University of Technology, Sydney]
[Additional images courtesy of Andrew Worssam, Anna Zhu and Daniel Stewart]
