Interview with Innovative Trailblazer: Megan Farleigh

Megan began working in 2020 as a graduate at Commonwealth Bank. She completed two rotations, one as an iOS developer and the other as a web developer - where she stayed full-time. When she first chose web development, she went into this team blind. Despite having limited prior exposure, she really enjoyed the problem-solving aspect of the team and getting to see the reach that her work had had. She even got to complete a project on the static analysis tool “SonarQube”, which started as a simple research task, but evolved into her becoming the team’s Subject Matter Expert (SME).  

IT professionals like Megan commit to creating meaningful products and processes with positive micro and macro impacts. Megan said that the most important impact she has observed throughout her career was “connection” - connecting people to people and people to services. She noticed this impact when reflecting on how services going down impacts us immensely. She commented that it seems we are becoming quite dependent on technology (especially for banking) and this dependence only seems to be increasing as time passes. 

IT is a field well-known for its dynamic nature - user requirements, market demands, and customer satisfaction can vary immensely. This complex problem of rapid evolution calls for some clever solutions and people dedicated to solving them. 

Megan admitted that staying up-to-date with rapid evolution can be difficult but she has a few strategies and support networks that allow her to remain curious and open-minded. She noted that she dedicates “time each week towards self-learning and continuous improvement”. She finds that it is important to learn on the job by exploring new skills and avoiding getting swept away within our projects. Megan also shared a wonderful learning strategy: reading! She subscribed to various tech newsletters and recommended TLDR.  

We continued the conversation about learning and exploring, and Megan had some wonderful advice to share with the community. She highlights that it is important to embrace new things and “never say no” to a learning opportunity. Just like how Megan dove head first into web development, we too can immerse ourselves in growth and development. Another important piece of advice she shared with us was related to welcoming failure in our endeavours. 

As we challenge ourselves with new opportunities, we are bound to encounter difficulties. However, these difficulties are seeds for our growth and should be planted into the soil of our lives once encountered. As Nikitha, Megan, and I are all outreach facilitators with WiEIT, we drew parallels with this piece of advice and one of the core teachings of school outreach: “fail fast, fail often” and try again. 

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Speaking of Megan’s involvement with WiEIT, she has had (and continues to have) a wonderful connection with the community. She was a school outreach facilitator throughout her degree and continues to support the program by joining our Industry panels to share her experiences during school campus visits. She was also a Lucy mentee and saw that she had a significant edge throughout her university courses from shadowing her mentor and networking. She stated that the community was important to her in university and she hopes “to assist in creating this sense of community for other people”. 

We hope that this conversation has inspired you to reflect on your own career journey. Feel free to join the conversation with your reflections as well as with any advice you may have for our community. 

Zeynep Nevzat, Gender Equity Ambassador