Electrical & Electronic Engineering · University of Canterbury
Engineering student · power & energy · aspiring clean-tech founder
I'm Tom — now in my first year of engineering at the University of Canterbury, drawn to where electronics meet energy. My aim is to become a professional power engineer and build technology that helps the energy transition along — I've already made a start.
About
I grew up in Wellington making things — from renovating houses with my parents to co-running a science festival for thousands of kids. Engineering wasn't a leap; it was the obvious next step.
I like understanding how things work and then building them: 3D-printed designs, electronics, and school-outreach projects like a bottle-rocket launcher, a paper-plane wind tunnel and an ESP32-powered AI bot. That instinct is what pointed me at engineering.
UC's engineering school runs one of New Zealand's strongest power-engineering programmes, backed by dedicated high-voltage and power-electronics labs and a national centre of excellence. It's the right place to go deep on energy systems — and to start something of my own.
The plan
A four-year Bachelor of Engineering with Honours in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, with a Power Engineering minor — mapped out course by course, and already underway.
Through UC's STAR programme I completed a full year of university maths (30 credits of calculus and linear algebra) while still at school — clearing both first-year engineering maths courses and lightening the year that decides entry into the professional stream.
The BE(Hons) in Electrical & Electronic Engineering: electronics and embedded systems from the silicon up, then power from devices to the grid. It's accredited for global practice under the Washington Accord.
The degree carries 800 hours of real engineering work experience — a chance to work alongside the power sector through UC's electric-power centre of excellence, and to start building the network that matters after graduation.
The final-year research project is a year-long, individual design-and-build. I want to aim mine squarely at a power-electronics or energy problem — and turn it into the first real prototype of a venture.
Where I'm heading
The electrification of everything needs people who understand both the devices and the energy behind them. I want to be one of them — and then build something with it.
Selected work
A hands-on portfolio from school, home and the family olive grove. The projects I've learned the most from are the ones where hardware, software and a fair bit of trial-and-error all meet.
I've been working with my dad on WattDodger, a New Zealand energy platform that shifts a home's heating and hot water to the cheapest, greenest hours — using the building's own thermal mass and hot-water cylinder as "the battery you already own". It's solar-, weather- and tariff-aware and learns each building so it can coast through peak-price periods. It's exactly the kind of energy-transition engineering I want to build my career on.
Visit wattdodger.com →
My final NCEA Design & Technology project: turn an old driver into a HiFi-quality speaker. I researched horn acoustics, folded a quarter-wavelength bass horn to fit the box (designing the curves with dinner plates and bowls!), cut and sandwiched many layers of plywood, then measured the response with a microphone. It became a speaker-desk I still use.
A little ESP32 microcontroller with a microphone and speaker, wired up to combine hardware with the OpenAI and ElevenLabs APIs into a talking bot. Most of the learning was in debugging exactly where the hardware ended and the software began.
A safe, compressor-powered launcher with a 3D-printed "launch collar", a pull-string release, a pressure regulator and a folding frame that packs into a car. We even flew a Micro:bit onboard to graph the acceleration. It's been borrowed by schools across Wellington for physics lessons.
A dead 1949 Ferguson, bought for $500, brought back to life: working out why it wouldn't run, replacing the timing chain and governor weights, setting the engine timing and tuning the carburettor by trial and error. Old machines are built to be fixed — a brilliant way to learn mechanics.
Over the uni break, olive-harvest machinery had cut up the lawn, so I turned a friend's old barrel into a tow-behind roller to repair it — a good excuse to practise design and MIG welding. I sketched it in isometric, kept the cut list under a single 8 m length of steel, built it on recycled pillow-block bearings, and sanded the welds back to check they'd bonded. It turned out really well, and the mower tows it easily.
And plenty more:
Community & interests
Engineering runs through most of what I do — including years of volunteering to help other people get excited about science and maths.
My parents started this charitable STEM festival and ran it for five years with 100+ volunteers, reaching up to 9,000 people across Wellington. I grew up helping build things for it — and made lasting friends among scientists and engineers. (That's me beside Eight360's NOVA simulator.)
A volunteer since 2017, helping people of all ages gain confidence with maths through making — origami, string art, flexagons and more. It's where I learned how powerful maths is for understanding the world, and a big part of why I chose engineering.
A project I use
Finding a warm, affordable flat near campus in Christchurch's tight market is genuinely hard. This companion tool pulls together large student flats near the University of Canterbury, with cost calculators, a fair rent-splitter and live listings — everything a flatting group needs in one place.