A NEW University of Limerick (UL) graduate said that his graduation marks a “dream come true”, having come to Ireland in 2022 with the hope of furthering his career.
Diego Silva, from Brazil, graduated from UL with a Professional Diploma in Data Analytics last week, securing his “dream position” in Ireland after returning to adult education at UL.
On his move to Ireland, Diego took a job as a night porter at a hotel in Shannon, despite being a qualified engineer back home with experience in lean manufacturing and quality control.
Mr Silva said that it was “always a dream” for him to move abroad to further his career.
“Ireland has always been great to me. It was a dream for a very long time to work in the profession I’m working in now in a different country,” the new graduate said.
“I came across this course and though I wasn’t working professionally at the time, I reached out to the course director, Professor Norma Bargary, for more information. In December 2022, I applied and got accepted. I started the course in January 2023. It was really good news for me, as I didn’t think my application would be accepted. Studying at UL was a big dream for me,” he said.
After taking a place on the course, Diego said that tuition at UL enabled him to accept an offer for his “dream” job, working as a quality and validation engineer with Jabil in Waterford.
“This position was a dream come true. I really wanted to work on projects and validation, and now I’m doing exactly that,” he said.
Mr Silva said that his education at UL helped him in the right direction with his new job, where he uses “data analytics to calculate different metrics around the validation that I’m doing”.
“I have also been doing some designs and some experiments around the work that I do. Taking the course really opened my eyes to the way I see data and how I interact with numbers and all the data around me. I can challenge the processes much more now with the information that I can take out of the data.”
Diego was among 1,200 other UL students to be conferred with degrees at the recent conferring ceremonies.
