designing a career

Sarah Meads

Senior School Leader

Work Experience Week is an epic milestone for our Year 10 cohort.  

Utilising the career development skills they have learned in COGS, students must decide a career avenue that they wish to investigate,  and then find a relevant work placement for themselves.

BSC students completed their work placements this term - covering diverse industries and services. Students found placments in nursing, building, teaching, manufacturing, trades, sports medicine, physiotherapy, dentistry,  retail sales and many other fields.  They have all returned wiser for the experience having developed work and personal skills  and having investigated life beyond Brunswick.

Dylan Sebire (Year 10) investigated the field of architecture -  learning, developing and discovering many skills throughout his week-long journey.  Skills that Dylan has learned at school, including research, marketing,  communication and presentation skills, have all been applied to his work experience environment - and Dylan really enjoyed this opportunity.  

Read Dylan's story to hear of the challenges he worked through and the experience he has gained.

Dylan Sebire

Year 10

I was assigned three tasks to be completed over the week.

On the first day of work experience, I had to select a person to research. I chose Kyrie Irving (an NBA player). On the first day I had to research some information about his personal life and career.  I had to construct three PowerPoint slides explaining why I chose him, presenting information about him and ideas of what I thought could to be included in a house for a man such as himself.  I also had to get some references, so I went on to different architecture websites and found buildings that I could use for inspiration.

My work on the second day was to write out a plan of how Kyrie Irving would spend a typical day. For example, Kyrie would wake up then go to the bathroom - so he would need the bathroom close to the bedroom. Then, he might have breakfast and so forth.  In this way, I constructed his day.

I then had to draw out a room plan of Kyrie's house based on his daily life so that it wasn’t going to be an issue getting where he needed to be. Once I had a rough idea of how this all worked I was instructed to draw on baking paper - you do this because you can draw the different levels of the house on different sheets and line them all up on top of each other. My original idea was that I wanted the house to be in the shape of Kyrie Irving’s personal logo, as he is a NIKE sponsored athlete.  This was a challenge as I had to fit all the rooms into the shape whilst still making the house functional!

On the third day I had to start building my model, so my plans were photocopied and printed to 0.5 scale of my original drawings. I could use these plans as stencils and foundations for my model. The model construction wasn’t as simple as I first thought, because I had a basement layer that meant part of the model had to be underground so the nets had to fit through holes in the ground. This was all I could manage on day three as it took a lot of time!  

Day Four was all about the main building; I made roofs for both underground areas and made the main ground floor and the second floor. As the day went on I slowly got better at making nets, finding new ways to make them sturdier and more robust. By the end of day four I had completed the entire building and it looked great.

On Day Five I added the finishing touches to my model such as the trees, fences and a front gate. I then went back to my desk and added image slides and design slides into my PowerPoint display. This took me until near the end of the day when I then had to take all my work into a meeting room and present in front of four top architects. The- team were really happy with the work I had done and said it was very professional.

After I had finished my presentation and received all the positive feedback, the architects talked to me about universities and possible career paths in architecture. They also explained to me how they each came to working in the field and to being part of the business.

This was an amazing week of work -  I learned heaps  of things and enjoyed it so much!