Rockhampton engineering student John Quinn has left his mark on Switzerland in the form of original contributions to a computer simulation software package used globally by scientists and engineers testing electrical systems...

The MATLAB software is produced by ABB Switzerland, where John spent the latter half of 2009 as an intern software engineer, as part of his degree program with CQUniversity Australia.

John Quinn - still abuzz about internship in Switzerland

In between writing innovative strings of software code for the multinational corporation, John was able to visit a nuclear power plant and the famous Large Hadron Collider, as well as working on his ice-skating and skiing skills.

"It was great because I was able to work in a diverse multinational team of engineers and technicians and could justify my design decisions when presenting my work to the team," he said.

John was able to help prepare customer user manuals and showed the initiative to translate and interpret German documents and fix software errors. He also gained experience interacting in a foreign culture and language as he navigated throughout Switzerland and Europe.

The excursion of a lifetime was in fact John's second work placement as part of the 'Co-op' portion of his degree. The first was with Ergon Energy in Rockhampton.

Since returning to Rockhampton for the start of 2010, John has been running computer simulations of procedures aimed at improving voltage regulation for Ergon's domestic customers. This week, he will be live testing on the Yeppoon network to show that the simulations work in practice.

 John is set to complete his degree towards the middle of this year and hopes to find employment in the power engineering sector.