My Year 10 work experience – Hugh Phan

When I first heard about Year 10 work experience it never crossed my mind that I might find myself spending a week in Bendigo, Victoria, building electric cars with Bortana.

I had already done some work with Baraja, a research and development company focused on building LIDAR sensors for autonomous vehicles. I worked there twice, 2 weeks in the July holidays 2022 and 3 weeks in the summer holidays 2023. I worked with the electronics team to make test protoboards and design simple PCBs.

From that experience, I was recommended to Bortana, who were looking for new engineers. I had lunch with one of the team leaders from Bortana and they agreed to host me for work experience. Bortana is a company that makes the Bortana EV, a battery electric mining light truck.

Baraja gave me the skillset and evidence that convinced Bortana to take me on for a work experience placement and that’s how I found myself heading down to Bendigo to spend a week working with the engineering team.

I was given a taste of Bortana from every engineering angle. Data & Telematics, Electrical, Software, Mechanical. For Data & Telematics, I analyzed the data from the car to profile bad batteries based on a number of key factors. For Electrical, I helped to build replaceable connectors for the car. This included, stripping, crimping, soldering and heat shrinking. For mechanical, I was tasked with tuning the 3D printer profile, I dialed in the settings and now the quality, speed, strength of all future 3D prints has all improved. For software, I was given an overview of the workflow and we went for a test drive. We drove it off road, in the bush and tested the regenerative braking systems on the car. At the end, I gave a presentation on my key takeaways, feedback for providing work experience experiences and feedback for the company as a whole.

This is the Youtube video that I made, documenting my experience in Bendigo.

Youtube Video: https://youtu.be/9YgXmWyHYn

I want to give a big thank you to all of the Bortana staff I worked with, especially Rikki, who hosted me there. Thanks to Mum and Dad and Miss Salisbury for greenlighting this experience. I’m looking forward to doing more work experience in the STEM field and I’m very excited for the future.

Hugh Phan – Year 10