Renewable Energy Engineering student profiles at Murdoch University

Stephen Tordorff - ImageMeet Stephen Tordoff

Mark Twain said "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society." The Renewable Energy Engineering degree gave me clothes to make a difference in a field of great opportunity and one that has brought me a number challenges and successes.

While at Murdoch my education included extensive book study but it also refined by fire the art of problem solving. Sometimes the problems involved how I was going to get my work done and still get out with the mates and other times it involved long hours in the computer labs and library developing solutions to engineering problems. There is no denying that the course was challenging but there was plenty of support from staff and facilities to accomplish the required work for those that applied the effort.

Since graduation I have worked for two companies. One was a small wind development company, Aeolis Wind Power, in British Columbia, Canada, where I was the sole technical person in a small team developing early stage wind projects in the Rocky Mountains. This experience of wearing many hats is very different to my current position where I work in more of a defined role for the largest renewable energy developer in the world, Iberdrola Renewables, in their North America Resource Assessment group based in Philadelphia. This position involves designing wind and now also solar energy projects across the United States and Canada. What makes this job increasingly interesting is not just the technical challenges but the interaction with other engineering, financial, and legal professions requiring a broad set of skills some of which were born at Murdoch.

The Renewables industry has a wide variety of engineering positions available to those seeking employment with resource development and project design being only one area of expertise. If you want domestic and international travel while getting paid to do a job you enjoy, I cannot recommend enough the Renewable Energy Engineering degree at Murdoch as a first step in the right direction.