A Red Bend Catholic College graduate who has gone on to work for global social media giant Facebook came back to Australia this month to share his story at his university.
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Aijay Adams was a guest speaker – one of four University of Wollongong graduates - at a Facebook Community Boost event.
Originally from Forbes, Aijay is now based on the other side of the world at Facebook’s Menlo Park Campus, where he is a Network Infrastructure Engineer working with Facebook’s connectivity program.
His role takes him all over the world, learning about connectivity challenges and how Facebook might be be support other organisations to bring more people online.
“I am very much a technical network engineer, and yes, sometimes that means helping out local teams getting a tower up and running in another part of the world,” Aijay wrote to the Advocate this week, “but it also means working with hardware design teams here at Facebook to make sure when it comes time for that tower to go up things are easy, and developing software so that the tower can join existing towers to make connectivity better for those using it, and working with regulators to ensure that spectrum regulations allow for financially feasible use of wireless technologies both by big telcos, and also communities.
“A lot of what I do is driven by the needs I hear on the ground from communities and operators in places where connectivity to the internet isn't as great as it could be.
“There are so many variables when you look at bringing connectivity to different parts of the world, if it were just a case of standing up a tower in each town someone would have done it.”
It’s an exciting role, working with a global team.
“There is always more you would like to do in a day at FB than you could ever really achieve ... good meaningful and impactful work that reality dictates you may not do, so planning is really important,” Aijay said.
Aijay told his university publication it was great to share his story with young students who might be wondering how to use their science and technology skills to achieve their dreams.
“I never would have dreamed of one day working on industry-leading projects for one of the largest technology companies in the world,” he said.
Aijay went to school at St Laurence’s and Red Bend, graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Engineering) and went on to Telstra’s graduate program.
He was approached by Facebook in 2014, then again in 2015. Recruitment involved formal application, a number of phone and in-person interviews. Aijay’s now been working in the US for nearly four years.
