From a UTS degree to a global career

Turning travel into a growth experience 

In Vietnam, 2025 New Colombo Plan scholar Bridie Macken is completing an internship with the Cerebral Palsy Family Association Vietnam. The Association is a partner of Australian non-government organisation (NGO) Caring and Living with Neighbours. 

For Bridie, a Bachelor of Communication (Social and Political Science) Bachelor of International Studies student at UTS, working for a local social enterprise was one of her scholarship goals. The New Colombo initiative delivered.

“The New Colombo Plan has a little portal where they sometimes post internship opportunities and that’s where I found mine,” she says.

Bridie’s Vietnam experience started with a month of intensive language study and a semester at Hanoi’s Vin University. Now, at the Cerebral Palsy Family Association, she’s working on a video about local artist living with cerebral palsy Nguyễn Thùy Chi to raise awareness of disability in Vietnam among international audiences. 

Her relationship with Chi, as well as with her colleagues and the families who visit the Association, have allowed Bridie to build a deep understanding of disability in international contexts. Her language skills have also been vital to learning about the people and traditions around her.

“People have been so eager to help me learn about their culture. I’ll be having a conversation with someone for the first time and they’ll give me an entire list of restaurants that I need to try or invite me to eat with them,” Bridie says.  

“Over Tết, which is the Lunar New Year, one of my friends from university invited me to her family home to make bánh chưng, which is the traditional Tết cake. Every evening, one of my coworkers drives me home on the back of her bike, and sometimes we go to the market together.”

Now, as the end of her time in Hanoi looms, Bridie is starting to think about how she’ll translate everything she’s learnt into future opportunities in Australia and beyond. Making a life in Vietnam has taught her just how much of the world is within her grasp. 

“I feel a lot more competent and confident in navigating difficult systems by myself,” she says.

“I don’t think I ever would have thought it was possible to just move to Vietnam and do an internship. It just made me realise how possible things are.”

Building skills for a global career 

Callum Burke’s New Colombo Plan experience might have been worlds away from the social enterprises of Vietnam, but the impacts on his life have been similarly profound. 

When he was named as a 2024 scholar, one of the first things he did was post on LinkedIn. If he’d ever wondered how the program would shape his future prospects, he got his answer—and quickly.   

A computer science student, Callum had originally planned to spend a year in Singapore, studying and working on cybersecurity challenges. But, as he was finalising his plans, a Bangalore-based tech company reached out. 

“The company is called Infosys, and they reached out to me on LinkedIn saying, ‘We actually have an internship program for Australians who are part of the New Colombo Plan program,’” Callum says. 

“It was just shocking to me that you could get headhunted just because of the scholarship. It really allows you to get out and make a name for yourself.”

Callum jumped at the chance to split his New Colombo Plan experience across two different countries. After completing a semester at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, he made the move to Bangalore where he spent two months working on real-world cybersecurity projects. 

“I learnt a lot about what it’s like to work with different cultures and values, which has made an impact on my ability to understand other people and their workflows,” he says. 

“But what's interesting about my field is that the work is rarely culturally or regionally specific. All companies in all countries use the same tools and the same programming languages, which means the skills I’ve gained have value everywhere.”

These opportunities have given Callum a quiet sense of confidence about his future, both as a professional and as a person who understands the world. Last summer, based on the strength of his experiences, Callum was offered an internship at global tech company Atlassian. 

He’s now due to start a grad position in 2027.

A career pivot leads to professional transformation 

Callum isn’t the only UTS student to transform his New Colombo Plan experience into an incredible job opportunity. 2024 scholar Cooper Crellin turned an internship in Tuvalu into a highly specialised coastal engineering career. 

A mechanical engineering student at UTS, Cooper had slowly come to the realisation that he wanted to explore a different professional path. The New Colombo Plan program offered the potential to apply his UTS learning in a new direction. 

“I wanted to get myself into the humanitarian or climate engineering space, so the New Colombo Plan opportunity came at the right time,” he says.

The Indo-Pacific turned out to be the perfect place for a career pivot. During a semester at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, Cooper immersed himself in the study of the environment. He also threw himself into learning iTaukei, one of the four primary languages of Fiji, and a lesser-used language called Rotuman.

After completing his studies, he travelled to Tuvalu to start an internship as part of the Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project, a major engineering initiative to strengthen the country’s defences against the threat of rising sea levels.

Over seven months of hands-on work, Cooper gained a deep understanding of Tuvalu, both from a climate engineering perspective and by getting to know the country’s people and culture, often through its languages.

“I worked with a group of Fijian tradesmen who often spoke amongst themselves in iTaukei, and I often tried joining in. Speaking their language was a quick way to show that I was interested in their culture and making an effort to learn more,” he says. 

“I also discovered that one of the tradesmen spoke Rotuman, so the next time I saw him, I greeted him in his language. It sparked a whole conversation that instantly built a strong connection between us.”

Cooper’s efforts on the worksite also caught the attention of the port project’s designer, who offered him a job as a coastal engineer back in Australia. It’s an opportunity that would have been out of reach without his experiences in Fiji and Tuvalu.  

“Coastal engineering is a really niche field, but there’s a lot of demand for it in Australia, and it’s only going to become more important as climate change impacts become more pronounced in the future,” he says.  

“Having the local knowledge is really important in terms of my ability to do this job. I could go on all day about the quirks and features of Tuvalu. Eighty per cent of my success in this role is just knowing the culture and the place and the people.”

One of Cooper’s favourite things about his job is that he regularly returns to Tuvalu as part of his company’s many projects. He has fond memories of his time there, and as it turns out, Tuvalu has fond memories of him, too: the last time he was there, he saw familiar faces everywhere, all ready to welcome him back.