ABOUT ME
MANI RISAL
EDUCATOR WITH A DECADE OF ENGINEERING EXPERIENCE
From High School Student to Award Winning Engineer
My story begins in 2oo9, when I graduated from a high school in Cranbourne, VIC, and commenced my Bachelors of Engineering at Monash University. I loved maths, physics, music and all things logical/mathematical. Coupling these natural interests with a strong work ethic, I excelled in my degree, graduating as a Civil Engineer with first class honours in 2013. It was during my years as an engineering student that I discovered my love for teaching. I tutored VCE maths, physics and even chemistry students and in the weeks leading up to university exams, I would “lecture” my university mates to help them understand engineering concepts that they couldn’t grasp on their own during the semester.
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My First Time Lecturing Engineering Mathematics A at Monash College in 2016
In 2016, after a couple of years working as a graduate engineer in a tier 1 engineering consultancy, I took a year off from my full time engineering role, and sought out casual jobs lecturing, tutoring and providing maths help desk support at Monash College, Monash University and RMIT respectively. It was during this time that I created my first online course. While I loved working in education, I knew I had unfulfilled aspirations in engineering and hence left my educator roles to go back into engineering, right as the Victorian Railway Industry was ramping up with multiple mega projects on the horizon.
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​The construction of one of my designs in Melbourne CBD in 2019 (left) and a presentation I gave at AusRAIL 2022 conference in Brisbane (right)
From 2017 to 2023, I was fortunate enough to work on some city shaping engineering projects and worked my way up to being a subject matter expert in Overhead Line Equipment/Overhead Wiring, a niche discipline within railway engineering that required a combination of knowledge from Civil, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. Although my focus was on engineering during those years, my love for education kept me coming back to teaching in some shape or form. I started a drum lessons side hustle on the weekends, created an online course called the Overhead Line Equipment (OLE) 101 series, and I became an AusRAIL conference presenter on the topic of “effective knowledge transfer in a world of remote working”.
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​An extract from an overhead wiring profiling tool that I created in 2023
2022 and 2023 were special milestone years for me, as I obtained chartership status through Engineers Australia, completed creating a program for overhead wire profiling, and was a joint winner of the 2023 Australasian Young Railway Engineer Award.
With a decade of engineering industry experience behind me, my desire is to now spend time educating the next generation of aspiring STEM students in Victoria, helping them achieve their academic goals in VCE, so they too can begin their story like I did, with an entry into the university course of their choice.
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