Helen Fazzino

“La Trobe University, for me, has been a pivotal part of my entire life. It’s the place where I learnt to learn.”

In her own words (adapted from her Living History interview)

My name is Helen Fazzino, I’m a partner with PwC, and I have responsibility for our people, culture and partnership. I came from a recently immigrated family; no other members of my family actually had the privilege of going to university.

I have wonderful recollections of days spent in the “Ag” where people connected; I remember a sense of freedom. I had a couple of really close girlfriends and there was a square in the middle of the “Ag” that we would just sit on the edge of and talk about where we were at with life and what was happening. I look back on that as not only formative, but also probably the warmest and some of the happiest days of my life.

I had the fortune of meeting my husband here on my very first day of orientation week. He had a long, grey trench coat on, a kind of army hessian bag and one of those horrible rat’s tails all the way down his back. To be honest he was a bit of a know-all and I don’t know that I particularly liked him, and he drank a lot.

If I look at the PwC partnership there’s quite a number of our partners here in Melbourne that have started their life’s learning at La Trobe University. If I think about the 6,500 people that we have at PwC today, the one thing that I desperately want all of them to have is a love of wanting to learn, of curiosity, of asking questions, and then being able to synthesise what they hear, add perspective, and share that more broadly with others.

I think the thing that I always know whenever I see a student from La Trobe University, there’s this sense of a little bit of grit and resilience, and the love of innovation. The quality and richness of an education and of learning about the world is incredibly important to us. It’s about being a great human and having great wisdom, and that starts with a wonderful education.