How RIT Croatia Helped Catapult Alumna Paula Pufek’s Career

By Dora Rašin, RIT Croatia student

One of RIT Croatia's most recognizable slogans is "We are the right takeoff for your global career." Alumna Paula Pufek can attest to this. The Sisak native certainly didn't expect her first post-college job to be at one of the most innovative Croatian companies in the world, yet that's exactly what happened. From 2017 to 2021, Paula received her initial vocational education at RIT Croatia, where she completed her undergraduate studies in Web & Mobile Computing. Following the end of her second year, Paula joined Ericsson as a Software Developer Intern. Thanks to her passion for programming and extensive theoretical knowledge, Paula was able to remain at the company until about halfway through her senior year, when she partnered with Rimac Automobili for her senior project. Immediately after graduating, Paula landed a software engineer position at Rimac, a title she proudly holds to this day.

Programming her way through RIT

While IT is traditionally a male-dominated field, Paula attests she didn't notice the gender gap at all. "I collaborate with people of different ages and genders, which made me realize [the gender gap] is completely irrelevant." Instead, Paula focuses her attention on what drives her to program, which is intuition, desire, and a thirst for knowledge. "It's very important how much you love something, and how ready you are to work for it. The end goal is that you get better, that you know more and learn more, and that you develop," she adds.

Challenges Paula encountered while at RIT include adapting to a new way of learning and working with others, as well as herself, and getting out of her comfort zone. She attributes the people, the knowledge required, broadening horizons, experiences lived, and mistakes made as her personal blessings.

Paula also expresses gratitude towards RIT's cooperative education program. Co-ops are a form of mandatory work experience students partake in after their second and third years over the course of 800 hours. If it was not for RIT Croatia's co-op program as well as the annual Career Education Day hosted, Paula believes getting the opportunity to work for Ericsson Nikola Tesla for her first internship would've been very difficult to achieve.

For her senior year project, Paula worked as a backend developer intern at Rimac Automobili. Paula, along the guidance of Rimac employees and college colleagues, was able to implement a mobile application connected to a server, which contained actual data from vehicles such as cars. That kind of profound teamwork inspired Paula to continue working on these types of innovative and cutting-edge projects. She mentions the experience was "unexpected and unbelievably fascinating. I had the opportunity to work with the latest technologies and gain the necessary knowledge, which now serves me in my work."

Why RIT Croatia?

Paula largely credits RIT Croatia for preparing her for the labor market because she learned "how to better approach a problem, along with the steps and the thought sequence needed to solve it, and to think critically and draw objective conclusions."

To those who believe only the public higher education system in Croatia is valid, Paula says, "You'll never know until you try. I think no matter what country you're in, it is worth the effort because you're interested in something, thus you want to learn and know more about it. That is the true motivation behind professors and students who achieved the desired outcome by enrolling in this college in the first place."

Even Luka Špoljarić, Paula's mentor at Rimac, can vouch for RIT Croatia students: "I am pleasantly surprised by the resourcefulness, dedication and technical knowledge of students who come from RIT to do their co-ops with us."

Paula's current and future plans

Paula is currently working on the backend part of an M2M (machine-to-machine) project, written in NodeJS. "When I tell people I'm working on a backend, they usually take it to represent a black box," Paula adds. However, this isn't the case. One of the backend's main functions is "to expose vehicle-related data to client applications, such as a desktop, the web, and mobile applications." To tackle an advanced task such as this one, Rimac employees fortunately use only the best programming languages in the IT industry, such as NodeJS and GraphQL.

In the future, Paula plans to be "exactly where [she is], with much more gathered knowledge and experience." She goes on to say, "That's what I like, and what I enjoy. I'm surprised everyday by how much I don't know, but also how much I learn, in practice every day." While it's undeniable that Paula is happy where she is now, she can't help but mention "If I had to do it all over again, RIT would unquestionably be my first choice."