On April 29th-30th, the Year 12 students of Rochester Secondary College (along with our teachers; Mrs. Borger, Mr. Huddy and Miss McLeod) visited Melbourne to gather more knowledge regarding universities as well and VCE courses in general.

I couldn’t tell you much about the bus trip down due to the fact I was asleep for all of it.

We first visited Deakin University at Burwood where we had a tour around the different buildings as well as the campus, the entire facility was absolutely huge, both the staff and students were welcoming to us all and happy to show us around and answer any questions we had.

We then caught the bus to attend the VCE and Careers Expo in Caulfield, where just about all Universities from Victoria and beyond set up informative gazebos for students to approach and ask questions about in order to grip a further understanding of the vast amount of opportunities available to them after school. The expo was packed and it was said that there was only half the amount of people there because of COVID which had me in awe.

We booked into the Hotel Claremont in South Yarra before attending the last activity for the day. It was a warm building, a nice patterned red carpet lined the flooring with framed paintings ascending upwards in synchronisation with the wooden spiral staircases. After dropping our bags off into our rooms, we visited Melbourne High School where we listened to a motivational speaker to ensure we start our next term off with some additional wisdom and a morale boost after the long year everyone was subject to previously.

The next morning we cleaned our rooms and packed our things up to leave the Claremont Hotel to continue the day ahead of us. We first drove to Hardrock climbing which was a heap of fun and hard work, some of us were having so much fun that we even put blindfolds on to try and beat the walls blind, a few succeeded. After that, the group of year 12 students split up into two groups, one to have lunch and the other to go to The Big Issue where we were educated about statistics regarding homelessness and how poverty may happen, as well as what the social enterprise (The Big Issue) does to combat this, we even had a guest speaker who had experienced it all as well as the mental effect it had on her as a person, the whole thing was a real insight for everybody into how the world sees and unfortunately judges people living in poverty plus the effects this has on those that are subject to it.

Lastly, to finish off the adventure, we visited Keilor Downs Secondary College where we were happily welcomed by staff and students and shown around the school. The assistant principal informed us that there are around 1300 students and 130 staff, as you could guess there were a few wows coming from the crowd of Rochester students. The thing that struck me the most was the size of the library, it would have been equal to that of a library in a mid-sized town, anyway, the students and staff loved having us there and once the tours were finished, we thanked them as they gave us snack bags to tide us over for the bus ride home.

Overall, a very valuable experience and worth the early morning to learn more about our futures.

By Hamish Wallace

School Captain

JMSS

John Monash Science School