One of the most valuable parts of my final year at university has happened outside the classroom. While finishing my Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering degree, I’ve also been working casually at Flexiq in an operational support role. Together, the two have changed how I approach engineering problems. For my final-year project, I’m using machine learning to classify defects in electricity distribution assets. At the start, I was focused on one question: how accurate can I make the model? It’s a natural place to begin as accuracy is easy to measure, compare and improve in small steps. University rewards that kind of thinking, because the problem is usually well defined before you get to it. Working at Flexiq has shifted my thinking. In operations support, I’ve learned how data is turned into insights that people can act on, helped develop visualisation tools, and picked up industry best practices that you don’t see in a textbook. It’s made me ask a different question: how does this help someone make a better decision? A model that sorts images into categories is useful, but the end user doesn’t need a category. They need to know what to fix first. Therefore, my project has become less about classifying images and more about building a workflow that turns those classifications into maintenance priorities, presented in a way that’s clear and easy to act on. Tools for building models are getting easier to use, but the model is only one part of the solution. The harder work is understanding the problem properly, dealing with low quality data, communicating results to people who aren’t engineers, and making sure the output fits into how they already work. None of that shows up in a training accuracy score, and I’ve learned more about it in a few months of working than I could have from coursework alone. If you’re a student and have the chance to work in your field before you graduate, I’d encourage you to take it. You don’t need to be doing anything glamorous. Just being around real problems, real data and real clients changes what you pay attention to. University taught me how to build things. Working is teaching me how to decide what’s worth building, and why.