Robogals Blog

The train ride from Melbourne to Adelaide takes 10.5 hours.  Our train ran a bit late though and took just over 11 hours instead!  8am - 6:40pm.  (Adelaide time is 30 minutes behind Melbourne time).  (I spent most of the time sleeping).  The Overland was pretty fun.  The majority of the clientele were the young at heart, the seats were big and comfy, and the cafe prices were extremely reasonable - like those you'll find at a country store!  (Which is great!  And meant we could pig out on scones as well as our normal lunch).  :)

We were welcomed at the station by Sarah Cirillo, the outgoing Adelaide chapter President and also the on-the-ground SINE Organiser in Adelaide.

Not only will this SINE be the best SINE ever, but we also had the most luggage ever, with 3 boxes of training materials and goodies to give away, and a suitcase!

After leaving our things at the hostel, we went to Sushi Train, a block away, for dinner.

There are 4 Sushi Train franchises in Cairns where I'm from, so I know the franchise well and am a big fan!  Unfortunately, there are no Sushi Train franchises in Melbourne, so I've been looking forward to the Adelaide Sushi Train for a while now!

It was nice to catch up with Sarah over dinner.

Then it was back to the hostel for some winding down emails and business, before bed.

I also found out about Codecademy tonight.  For those who want to learn how to code, it has a nice and easy-to-follow introductory tutorial.  If you do give it a go, please leave your feedback below as I'll be interested to hear your thoughts about it!

Cheers,

Marita

PS:  I'll upload some photos and delete this post script tomorrow.  Need some forty winks now...

Hello everyone!

My name is Marita and I'm the Founder and Executive director of Robogals.

I'm currently in my 5th year of mechatronics engineering and computer science at the University of Melbourne. It's a long degree, but it's very challenging and stimulating. :)

I'm posting because tomorrow is when I leave (by train!) for Adelaide to attend the Robogals SINE (national conference) AU/NZ 2011. It's the 5th SINE we've ever run, and I'm promised that it will be the best. :)

There'll be heaps of fun activities, free stuff and amazing female engineering students there, so I cannot wait!

To have a peek at what's in store, we have new t-shirts! They arrived on Monday - two days ago - after the Melbourne and Global chapters went to the Synchrotron for a site-visit, which is why some of us were able to model the shirts.

Front:



Back:



The winning design is by Jonathan Diolaso from New South Wales, who wins a free t-shirt and the joy of seeing his design on hundreds of people all over Australia, the UK and the USA.

As well as that, we have free swag from our fantastic sponsors GE, Leighton Holdings, and Google for our early RSVPs.

Anyway, there's heaps more to do until tomorrow, so I'll blog again when I'm on the train on my way to Adelaide :)

Cheers,

Marita