Leadership News

Year 9s at the Snowy River Campus School for Student Leaders

My name is Lilith Stewart and I am currently attending the Snowy River Campus School For Student Leadership along with two other year 9 students, Tina Le and Tully Mitchell. The SSL is a term long school where we learn about leadership skills, participate in outdoor adventures as well as learn about self and social awareness. I applied to come here because I wanted to learn more about myself, become a better leader and make lots of friends.

We have been here for 7 weeks now and my highlights so far have been setting and achieving goals to improve myself, learning to surf, hiking and camping in a beautiful area and getting to know the 29 other students from all across Victoria. I have learnt valuable skills such as social awareness, metacognition, persistence, leadership and confidence and I have thoroughly enjoyed constantly striving to make the most of my time here. Being here at SSL is different to normal school in many ways, firstly we sleep, work, play, eat and rest all in the same area with the same community of people whom we get to know really well. Another difference is that we have duties each day such as washing dishes, mopping floors, setting up meals etc. Each day we also have two students who are in charge of running the day, meeting with the teachers and leading the other students. In a normal day we have a morning class starting at 9am, then an afternoon class, then reflection time at 5pm and an evening class after dinner at 7:30.

The days are long and busy which is great as we get to do so many amazing things and make the most of each day. Twice in the term we have ‘expos’ which are overnight hiking/canoeing trips that we do with our ‘expo team’ of fifteen people. As well as educating us in outdoor skills, these expos also allow us to learn teamwork, persistence and leadership skills that we will use throughout the rest of our lives.

Another great thing about being here at SSL is that there are opportunities to join committees such as cooking, expo, t-shirt designing, documentary making, working with primary students, sports and bikes. I have tried to get involved with as many of these as possible such as cooking, t-shirt designing and working with the primary students. Through this I have had the opportunity to take on many leadership roles and work with great people towards organising fun and creative events.

Being here at SSL is like having a second home for a term, we get to know all of the other students and feel like part of a great community. I would definitely recommend applying for the opportunity to come here as it is a life-changing memorable experience that will affect us for the rest of our lives.