As a child, Ryka remembers waiting nervously offstage, anticipating the cue to take her place under the spotlight to dance ballet – with all its elegance and grace – never dreaming she would one day trade her ballet slippers for drills and hammers and heavy machinery in the male-dominated field of engineering.

But life rarely moves in a straight path – it’s often full of pirouettes and twists as we seek to find our place in the world.

One of the key turning points in Ryka’s journey happened when she moved to Japan for a year.

Still a teenager, it was her first time living away from home, let alone overseas, leaving behind her tight circle of childhood friends and close family to live in Shimokitazawa, a picturesque district of Tokyo.

When she moved back to Australia, she took another leap of faith on an electrical apprenticeship with Ergon Energy – a move she never would have considered a year earlier.

“I went to an all-girls school,” she says. “I was a stereotypical ‘girly girl’ – I was into arts and crafts and ballet. No one would have expected me to become an electrician.

“But I like proving people wrong, so I took the opportunity and I loved it!”

As an apprentice, Ryka spoke to many engineers, sparking a curiosity that would only be satisfied a few years later when she took another leap of faith and enrolled in Mechatronics at UniSC.  

Ryka is keen to help break this bias. But she had reservations about attending university again.

“I’d started studying a Bachelor of Arts when I was living overseas,” Ryka says. “But I was freshly out of high school, living overseas for the first time – I felt isolated. It didn’t help that I was studying externally too.

“So I was a little bit hesitant to go back to uni. But this time was different – I knew what I wanted to do.”

Any fears Ryka might have had were eased once she started studying.