Being tall has its advantages and disadvantages when you are a woman. For example, it makes you an excellent basketball player – but a terrible pilot.
Leah Swain is tall. She’s also always been interested in figuring out how things work. Leah tried to figure out the complexities of her favourite childhood toys right through to her first car and computer. It seems she was destined to work in a technical trade, but achieving the career of her dreams took a little longer than she’d planned.
Joining the Australian Army had always been at the back of Leah’s mind.
“I looked into joining long before I finished school, but I only got serious about it in year 12 and at that point I decided I wanted to be a pilot. Unfortunately I’m too tall, so I went away and did some other things; went to college in America, played some basketball and worked in a bunch of civilian jobs that just weren’t for me,” she says.
Just as an FYI, you should know that this advertorial is sponsored by Australian Defence Force.
Then, one fateful day, Leah sat down to watch TV and saw an ad for the Australian Defence Force. She thought to herself, “Why didn’t I do that?” and six months later, she’d enlisted.
Leah is now a Telecommunications Technician in the Australian Army.
The job not only doesn’t have any height restrictions, it also requires the talented 26-year-old to work with high-tech military grade communication equipment providing communications, information systems, and electronic warfare support to the Australian Army and the wider Australian Defence Force (ADF).