2022 Annual Review

Only six Australian universities are in the prestigious and highly competitive Trailblazer University Program, and the University of Southern Queensland is one of these. We are also the only one in space research, which is our innovative $180 million iLAUNCH program, helping to develop Australia’s sovereign rocket launch capability. We have three large and well-established campuses: Toowoomba, our home campus for 55 years; Ipswich, where we offer law and a range of allied health and wellness programs; and Springfield, which I call our ‘innovation campus’, that offers engineering, IT, business, radio and TV, education and aviation. The University of Southern Queensland is also a leader in distance education—offering most degree programs online. You may not know that the University of Southern Queensland has a large space observatory just outside Toowoomba, with our Minerva Australis array of telescopes tracking spacecraft in NASA’s exoplanet program, looking for life beyond the solar system. One of our other telescopes tracks ‘space junk’, together with the German Space Agency. We have two flight simulators, a Boeing 737 simulator at Springfield, and a state-of-the-art Airbus A320 full sized cockpit at Toowoomba for our aviation students, as well as many other cutting-edge facilities. The university’s philosophy is ‘access excellence’, and we want our students to go beyond, and fulfil their potential. I am going to add to the many times you will have been told that ‘you are the brightest and best’ and that you are ‘Australia’s future’, because you are. You now have a remarkable opportunity to use that advantage, opportunity, and potential. In my earlier career as a Law Lecturer, I taught an estimated 13 000 students here in Brisbane—so many that when I attend a function in Brisbane, invariably someone comes up to me and says, ‘you taught me’. Law remains one of the most popular degrees for our brightest and best students, and despite what you may hear in the media about a ‘glut of lawyers’, we need them to solve major commercial problems and disputes, structure large deals, act in industrial issues, sort out personal issues in family law, and myriad other small practice areas including criminal law. But law isn’t the big glamorous career that it can seem, and by the second year of the degree sometimes students start to realise that it isn’t what they expected and begin to get disillusioned. Burnt out. Unfortunately, burnout is very high in the legal profession due to the stressful nature of the work,

and many use their degrees to move into other careers. It is no coincidence that hardly anyone I went through law school with is still practising law—but we would all agree that our degrees were important and influential in our later careers. Some of the happiest and most fulfilled people that I have seen in my career in higher education are not just following their dreams, they really are going to change the world we live in. They are astrophysicists working on new discoveries on life outside the solar system; scientists working in space agriculture or resource mining in space; materials engineers working on innovative materials for the skin of rockets; electrical engineers who invented a system to transport premature babies in aircraft; plant scientists discovering new plant varieties to (literally) save the world and working on cutting-edge new agricultural technology in the use of pesticides—an endeavour which has enormous positive implications for organic agriculture and land use. Our researchers are working on projects in climatology and the implications of climate change right now here in Queensland, they are trying to address food security and research cancer

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Brisbane Girls Grammar School Annual Review 2022