Met at Monash
Relationships from friendships, business partnerships and even marriages continue to be forged at Monash. Read stories from fellow Monash alumni on how they 'met at Monash'.
Back in the early 2000s, the Monash students had come to know each other through their work in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Having completed a Bachelor of Arts and her honours year in science, Michelle was a PhD candidate in the department, under the supervision of Steve Bottomley.
Michael, who had completed his honours in computer science under Maria Garcia de la Banda, was working as a research associate on a bioinformatics collaboration with James Whisstock, also in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Show moreWith supervisors who were friends and collaborators, and offices and labs near each other, Michael and Michelle were bound to cross paths.
A get-together with colleagues in The Den broke the ice, while a shared conference held in Sydney cemented the friendship. And then Michael decided to invite Michelle on a date – indoor rock climbing – when they were back in Melbourne.
Not an avid rock-climber, Michelle declined, saying she had “lab work” to do, but decided to ask Michael out for a coffee one evening.
Racing out of a choir rehearsal (where she tutored for the Australian Girls Choir), Michelle met Michael and, although it soon transpired that neither actually drank coffee, they began dating.
After marrying in 2006, they moved to the US, where Michael joined Microsoft, and Michelle worked at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. They moved back to Melbourne in 2009, where their two children were born, as was Rome2Rio.
The Monash bond runs deep for Michael and Michelle. His father, Max Cameron, is an emeritus professor at the Monash University Accident Research Centre, and his brother, Jamie Cameron, also completed a Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours) at Monash.
Michelle’s brother, Ernest Chow, and sister, Elaine Chow, also completed undergraduate degrees and PhDs in science. Ernest is a Monash Fellow (2016) who also completed a Bachelor of Laws (Honours).
Working part-time in technical support at his former high school, the Monash mechanical engineering/physics student had streamlined the digital directory, found and reinstated all the computer mouse balls stolen by students, and stopped them from being able to change desktop backgrounds to rude pictures. But he was powerless against the piles of uncollected print jobs that gathered every day beside the photocopier in the library.
Show moreInfuriated by the waste, he asked his friend, Matt Doran, who he’d met at Monash, and who was studying computer science and electrical engineering, to help him write some code. His vision: software that could be installed to not only monitor printer usage, but encourage users to save paper through, for example, print quotas they could share or exchange.
“I remember Chris picking my brain at a few parties,” says Matt. “Very techy stuff, like in what programming language should we write it.”
The conversations eventually moved from parties to the kitchen sink, where the idea took serious shape in Chris and Matt’s share-house. Both had started working in their chosen fields, but PaperCut bubbled away and, when it started earning more than their day jobs, Chris convinced Matt to join him to take “a leap of faith” and work in the business full-time. It was 2005, just four years after graduation.
Their first customer was the same local school that had sparked the initial idea. Their second was a tech-head American real estate agent, who wanted to rein in his employees’ colour printing, and who paid them by credit card online – quite a novelty in those days.
From there, fuelled by word of mouth in the education sector, business grew. And when Monash, then Oxford and Harvard came onboard, it was off and running.
“We weren’t like a startup with a huge marketing budget or anything,” says Matt. “We just build things we think serve the customer well, and it’s just gone from ‘A to B’.”
Today, PaperCut has 100 million-plus active users globally in the public and private sectors, from education to healthcare and the corporate world. Partnering with the world’s tech giants, it delivers secure printing systems that save time, costs – and paper.
“It’s a bit mind-blowing to look back on, actually,” says Matt of the company’s growth; it now employs 200 people in roles from product engineering to customer support and marketing.
Monash graduates were among PaperCut’s earliest employees, and Chris and Matt’s connection to the University has helped the business evolve, through their own networks and broader association, as alumni all over the world have become customers.
In turn, they support young talent through PaperCut’s intern program for students from Monash and other universities, and partnerships with Swinburne University and the Melbourne Business School.
They also promote STEM careers by running in-house ‘speed dating’ sessions for John Monash Science School students. These demonstrate that the breadth of jobs within a software business – such as marketing, social media and accounts – can appeal to anyone, “not just the geeky people in the corner like Matt and I were at university”, says Chris.
PaperCut’s egalitarian and creative work culture (everyone is trained as a barista to level the playing field among staff) has prepared it well for the challenges of COVID-19. Customer-facing employees were redeployed, and opportunities are emerging beyond printing, says Chris – in cloud technology, digitisation, document scanning, and workflow in decentralised workplaces.
“Internally, we describe our culture as a 100-year startup,” Chris says. “It’s that notion of having that entrepreneurial, fast-paced and positive energy aspect, but doing it with a long-term view and with a purpose, with an intent of something bigger than maximising shareholder value.”
After they each won a Colombo Plan Scholarship to study in Australia, they began, in 1964, their medical courses at Monash.
Siew-Har was first, bonding with chemistry partner Boon Low “fighting over experiments” in the lab. “He was very neat and I was a bit untidy,” she explains. But the opposites attracted.
In her second year, Siew-Hoon met Leong Lim “over a cadaver”, she says with a laugh.
He had transferred to medicine from science, and at lunchtime they would stay back in the anatomy lab to perfect their dissections.
“We were nerds,” Siew-Har says. And that strong work ethic saw the twins graduate equal-third in their year. “People said we were telepathic, that we would each study half the text and read each other’s minds, but I wish! Really, we just studied together,” she says.
“Every night without fail,” Siew-Hoon says.
The twins were boarding with a Scottish couple with whom they became lifelong friends, and while they studied they were also getting to know their future husbands. Money was scarce, so courtship was simple. Shared coffees progressed to lunch, then long walks through the Royal Botanic Gardens, movies and lots of talking. “We hung around together back then, and we’re still hanging around now,” says Siew-Har.
“Over 50 years later,” adds Siew-Hoon.
After their final exams, and before graduation, Siew-Har and Boon married. Held at a city Chinese restaurant, and without parents, their wedding served as a huge celebration for the 1964 graduating class. “We had a ball. It was like a big medical party,” says Siew-Har. “Everyone had such a good time. We asked three different friends to take photos, and none of them came out. None! I think they were drinking too much to load the camera properly.”
That cohort has remained close, and reunited last year for the 50th anniversary of their graduation – the twins organising fundraising for a scholarship on their behalf. “We got to where we are on scholarships, so I always say, ‘We have got to give back, because it makes a difference to somebody’s life’,” Siew-Har says.
Their Monash education taught them how to think and how to question as well. “It was a young university full of ideas,” Siew-Hoon says.
“But there was a lot of mud. I had to buy my first pair of boots,” Siew-Har says.
Under the terms of their scholarships, the twins and their partners returned to Malaysia, where Siew-Hoon and Leong were married. Both couples began their careers, and each had two children, but when the Whitlam government brought a legal end to the White Australia (immigration) policy, they returned to Australia, to their friends, freedoms, and a country they loved – even if the lack of ‘home help’ and childcare took some getting used to.
After subsequently running Eildon hospital in country Victoria, the couples settled a few streets away from each other in Melbourne’s east, establishing their own general practices in adjacent suburbs. Their patients, says Siew-Har, sometimes confuse them in the street. “They say, ‘Which Dr Cheah are you?’, and I say, ‘Well, which Dr Cheah do you attend?’.”
Their children, also all Monash graduates and now working in medicine and finance, grew up together – more like siblings than cousins, sharing one babysitter between them.
Now in their 70s, the twins are as close as ever, continuing to practise tai chi together while juggling grandchildren with paid and volunteer work. Siew-Har and Boon still work at their clinic, while Siew-Hoon volunteers at Camcare, helping vulnerable people navigate daily life.
Their husbands, too, also still get along. “One cooks and one eats,” they say with a laugh. “So they are a good combination.”
It’s a compatibility that, over a dozen years, has taken them all the way from graduation to the US and the Ivy League, to marriage, two small children and glittering careers in Silicon Valley, where they now live.
“We basically did everything together,” says Hemant of their move overseas to embark on their PhDs. It was the first time either of them had lived out of home, so they applied to 13 schools to ensure they would be able to live together in the same city, wherever they ended up. “And we were very, very lucky that I got to MIT [for aerospace engineering] and Dilani to Harvard [for physics], which are walking distance from each other.”
Show moreBack on that first day at Monash, the two made an instant connection when, introducing themselves around a table, they both nominated “space” as a special interest. They took a lot of classes together, but also had common ground outside of study, sharing the same friendship group and taste in movies.
“We were hanging out a lot,” says Dilani. “We enjoyed talking to each other ... that’s how it started.”
A year later, their common love of space propelled their friendship to the next level. Apart over the summer holidays, they found themselves together at the start of second year on a Monash trip to the Parkes radio telescope. “It’s a pretty magical setting,” says Hemant. “That was kind of the beginning.” And the rest is history.
Since leaving Australia, the couple have also remained close with their Monash cohort. “We are spread out all over the world – in Europe, the US and Australia – but we still are very much best friends,” says Hemant. “We started with the 21sts at Monash, and now it’s weddings and kids’ birthdays.”
One of those friends, who lives nearby in San Francisco, was married in France last year, “and our little group of friends who we did engineering with all went to the wedding”, Dilani says.
These days, travel restrictions have put a halt to more than their social lives; Hemant and Dilani’s parents have been unable to visit since the birth of their second child, Eva, in June. But while their careers have kept them physically apart from their families, they both work in technology that’s helping to keep people connected.
After her doctorate, Dilani, inspired by New York’s entrepreneurial community and a “business bootcamp” at McKinsey & Company, began work in the fast-moving tech scene with Etsy. A stint at Facebook followed the couple’s move west, and she’s now with Australia’s Atlassian as a product manager on its Confluence software, a work-management tool and communication hub that has come into its own keeping business teams working efficiently together from home.
As for Hemant, he’s realised his dream of working with space. In the leadership team of startup Astra, he’s building rockets to launch small satellites engineered to image the Earth, connect devices and build networks – the very technology people are reliant on to stay in touch in the time of COVID-19.
It’s challenging work, says Hemant, because as a startup, with 100 employees and $US100 million in funding, things have to move fast. “But as an aerospace vehicle, things have to be done right. Otherwise, it blows up.”
It’s a stratospheric trajectory that neither imagined as undergrads. But, says Hemant, “each decision has made perfect sense ... every step of the way”.
While work keeps them happily in the US, the couple still consider Melbourne home. Their Monash connection, maintained through an alumni chapter in the Bay Area, keeps them up to date professionally. “It’s a taste of home, but also Australians who are over here tend to be doing really interesting things,” Hemant says.
“We spent so much time closely planning everything, and then the coronavirus hit,” Merciana says.
Everything had to be cancelled – everything, that is, but the marriage itself. The nuptials took place in June in a small, private ceremony with Merciana’s family watching via Zoom. It wasn’t quite what they had imagined, but with so much uncertainty swirling around whether or when they could reschedule, they took their opportunity when they could. “We decided to go ahead and not let the coronavirus change our plans,” says Mericana. “And it was quite unique.”
Show moreIt was the first real hiccup in Nicholas and Merciana’s romance, which can be traced to Monash University Malaysia. There were a few years and different subjects between the engineering students, but Merciana (chemical) and Nicholas (mechanical) met through hiking and running groups, and became friends.
Nicholas liked that Merciana enjoyed the same tough bushwalks he did and, although he was quiet, his unorthodox fashion sense had caught Merciana’s eye. “He was always coming to uni wearing singlets, shorts and slippers. It’s not a usual look for a Malaysian guy,” she says. “That’s what got my attention.”
But Nicholas wasn’t trying to impress her. “For me, I was going to uni for an education,” he says. “So I just dressed simple.”
So focused was he on study that it wasn’t until after he graduated, and Merciana had returned to Malaysia in 2016 for her final semester after an internship in Singapore, that Nicholas asked her out.
“He had four months to convince me to stay on in Malaysia before going back to Singapore,” Merciana says. And he succeeded. While they realised they both still shared a love of the outdoors, Merciana discovered there was more to like. “He is a very good cook,” she says. “And I really enjoy a good meal.”
Working life in Malaysia suited Merciana too, and today she’s in business development in the solar energy industry. Nicholas, after three years as an engineer, is now in life insurance – spurred by an aunt who became ill with cancer and whose medical bills consumed the family finances.
The two still see all their Monash friends; the small campus had helped form fast and long friendships across faculties.
Merciana and Nicholas are both involved with the alumni community, with Merciana last year organising mentorships for female alumni with industrial leaders as part of the Monash Malaysia Business Alumni Chapter’s Thrive 2.0 program, on whose committee she serves.
She says the role has enabled her to learn from business leaders while reconnecting with Monash alumni. “I wanted to give back to Monash after experiencing so much,” she says.
Now, when it comes to reorganising her own wedding celebration, Merciana isn’t too fussed. “After getting married, I feel like we’re already settling down. We don’t need to have a ‘wedding’,” says Merciana.
“Just a party,” says Nicholas.
