Thrive project: Helping all young Australians finish school well

So, I'm actually a refugee. Um, I was very young when I came to Australia. As a refugee, if you don't have your permanent residency, you actually can't go to uni as a domestic student. You've got to go as um as an international student.

So, when I was in high school, most of the time I was very stressed out thinking I might not be able to go university no matter if I get good marks or not. Because even if I get good marks, I can't afford to go as an international student. I was waiting on my visa and it was taking a long time.

So that was always at the back of my head and I think that like it made me lose motivation as well. Um I think every second Tuesday we'd have this Muslim class and I would attend this class um and we'd have a speaker that comes in and talks to us.

He was talking to us that sometimes something doesn't happen until the very right moment and that everything happens for a reason. I remember it very clearly cuz it made me not stress out as much. I just needed to be patient and wait for the right moment.

So it was good to be with people like me of the same religion and it felt like a little community. Um you learn more when you have a connection with someone.

School should be built about creativity. School should be about developing and creating stuff and helping you evolve. I think AIM would have been the best thing to put in. We had individual mentors but we also worked in groups a lot of the times and it was just to develop connections and community connections.

I never really knew what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to do something in the creative field, but then going to Tafe sort of cleared it up and made me realize what I wanted to do specifically.

A couple of times at the really posh school, I almost got into like scuffles with people. It would always be like talking behind each other's backs because with that sort of bullying, it's the worst form because when you call it out, you're the one that's going to get in trouble.

I was just figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. Why am I at school? Where now? And my school did not have child care at all, the career I'm doing now. So, I had to go out and find my own way of sourcing that information. One of the best things I've ever done for myself was going to that trade school. It's a college. Um, and there I did a TvEet course, which is a traineeship, and you also get your HSC. Yeah. They they had almost everything you can think of for the trades, especially for child care.

They had a full child care room with resources. The teachers were amazing there. My teacher, I loved her so much. The people there were really, really good friends. They showed me that I was able to thrive in a school environment. And it kind of proved to me what school should be.

One of my favorite people to talk to is the permaculture teacher. So, he's very opinionated and he's very smart. Like, he sometimes says things to catch a student's attention. He'll say, "Rocks are alive." And they'll say, "No, they aren't. they don't have a brain. He'll say, "Well, neither do trees and neither do jellyfish." He's really given me ample opportunity to kind of think through how the world kind of works.

I think the thing about learning is when you stop learning a subject, you're just going to forget everything you learn in that subject. What you really want is for students to develop skills. Develop skills to learn. It's about training people to think.