Stories › Alumni
Alumni
From aerospace to quantum engineering: how NYSF helped Emelia Hosking find her direction
When Emelia Hosking arrived at the 2026 NYSF Year 12 Program, she knew she wanted to study engineering. What she wasn’t sure about was which kind.
Aerospace or aeronautical engineering had always seemed like the likely path. But a live cross with CERN, where she was introduced to the research happening inside the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, sparked an interest that changed her plans.
Now, the Dubbo College Senior Campus student has received four university offers, including one to study quantum engineering at UNSW.
Emelia first heard about NYSF through friends who had been interested in applying in previous years, as well as her school’s head teacher of science, who encouraged students studying science subjects to consider the program.
Although her local Rotary club was ready to support her financially if she was accepted, she wasn’t certain her application would be successful. That support helped make attending possible, and she’s happy to acknowledge the role financial assistance played in her experience.
Before NYSF, Emelia was already interested in engineering, but hadn’t settled on a specialisation. Her interest in quantum engineering had begun a few years earlier, through a rural program run by the Sydney Quantum Academy at her school in Year 10. The program introduced her to quantum computing and its potential to process multiple possible outcomes and identify the best result.
It was an introduction to the possibilities of quantum technology, but NYSF helped bring those possibilities into sharper focus.
During the program, Emelia took part in a live cross with CERN, where presenters Steven Goldfarb and Neza Ribaric introduced participants to the Large Hadron Collider and the particle physics research being conducted using the ATLAS detector.
Their enthusiasm for their work made an impression.
“Their own passion for the work they were doing with CERN motivated my own interest in the possibility of working with CERN as a future career,” Emelia said.
The experience also reconnected her with the innovations happening in quantum computing at Australian universities. Bringing those ideas together helped her see a future in quantum engineering that she hadn’t seriously considered before.
“I think the NYSF program was the push I had been looking for to decide that I truly wanted to pursue Quantum Engineering,” she said.
That decision has now taken a concrete step forward. Emelia has received four university offers: a conditional offer from UNSW for a Bachelor of Engineering, with quantum, telecommunications or electrical engineering options; an offer from the University of Newcastle for a Bachelor of Aerospace Systems Engineering; an offer from Macquarie University for a Bachelor of Engineering; and an offer from ANU for a Bachelor of Computing.
