Careers Exploration Opportunities
Career Exploration Opportunities
Congratulations to Annika Bennett-Stenton and Teyah Evans for their initiative and dedication to pursuing career opportunities in the September holidays. Many opportunities, whether they be camps, work experience placements or seminars run in the holidays. More will be available in the coming Christmas holidays. Check out the Career News to keep up with these or simply Google what you are interested in and see what results you get. Below are Annika and Teyah’s reports about their experiences.
Australian Defence Force Work Experience - Annika Bennett-Stenton Year 10
In the September school holidays, I went and did my work experience in Darwin at the Robertson army barracks. It was such a fantastic opportunity as I would like to join the Army after school. I got to meet plenty of outstanding, hard-working soldiers. I had the chance to look around and look at the different jobs the Australian Army has to offer, and I met with recruiting officers and lots of different people. You get to play with some pretty cool toys, look at different cars, and ask as many questions as you want. It was amazing to be surrounded by the eight other people in the work experience group, and I made lots of new friends. I won an award for asking lots of questions and being very focused. I would suggest this to anyone interested in the defence force. I am so grateful that Mr Harms was able to organise for me to go. This was overall a highlight of my year. It gave me clarity on what I wish to do when I leave. I would highly suggest this as it is a wonderful opportunity and gave me the insight I couldn't find online. Overall, a 10/10 experience.
Camp SEEK - Teyah Evans Year 10
The 25th of September brought a new challenge for me being Camp SEEK 2023. Although I was driven to the city in the first morning, I was left to fend for myself as I tried to not get lost on the trains of Melbourne (I was a pro by the end of the week). I got to see a glimpse of what life was like in the big smoke as I saw all the different people of Melbourne. The biggest challenge from the week was when I had to walk into a room of about 100 people whom I didn’t know. The one thing I did know is we all had enough interest in STEM to give up a week in our holidays for it. I was introduced to the 8 people I would be spending the next week working with and asking as many questions as I could to find out what it was like to go to school with 3,000 other people.
An icebreaker of the ultimate rock paper scissors tournament got us all talking and believe you me we didn’t stop after that. We were then introduced to our problem that over the next four days we would be figuring out a solution to. We were given the challenge of “Safe And Sound Online.” My group (Team Post-it’s) picked a branched-off topic about screentime to tackle. We then learnt what a problem question is and how to structure one. We thought of all the ways we could possibly solve this problem starting off with some very realistic solutions then moving on to some crazy solutions such as blowing up everyone’s devices. We then found a common ground and picked our favourite solution. We learnt what Lo-Fi prototypes and Hi-Fi prototypes were and made one ourselves using Figma. And we also did some coding… well tried to. After about an hour of trying to set up Android Studio we threw in a white flag and split everyone who had it set up learning how to code with the platform and everyone whose computers weren’t cooperating learnt how to code a website. We also learnt some storytelling techniques to help us present our pitch to parents, friends, and other seek employees. I got to see what it was like to be a project manager as we defined what our solution did how it looked and what our pitch was going to sound like.
Our solution was an app called CheckIt! This is an app aimed to help parents and their children manage both the real and online worlds. We found that many kids our age already had massive screen times so we thought by creating this app we could help children build a healthy relationship with devices from an early age. Our app is parent controlled. Each aspect of a child’s screen time could be accessed from a parent device. Our app has a timer for children to be able to take responsibility for their own usage. There is a to-do list feature that allows parents to set tasks for their kids, once the child completes the task, they can mark it off on their app which is then sent to the parent to approve it has been done. Children with an account on the program can add their friends to see each other’s progress which adds an element of competition.
Our solution won us an award, being the Storytelling award for the best presented pitch. We, unlike the others, had a skit in our presentation to add humour and draw in everyone’s attention. This award gave us $200 which we donated to the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.
I am very grateful for this opportunity I was given and would very much encourage anyone who was interested in STEM to give it a go when you get offered.