A HEAD OF CAREERS RECENTLY SAID:
"Most careers sessions are either too vague to be useful or so prescriptive students tune out. We need someone who can actually engage them and give them tools they'll use after the session ends."
That's what I do.
Most careers practitioners tell students what to think about. These sessions ask them questions they haven't been asked before.
They write. They think. They find something specific.
By the end of a session, a student has language for something true about themselves that they couldn't have named when they walked in. That language goes into their personal statement, their interview answer, their university application, their first job pitch.
This is what sessions at Redlands School, Pymble Ladies' College, Emanuel School, The Illawarra Grammar School, and five years as Head of Careers at Newington College are built around.
SESSIONS FOR YEARS 10, 11 AND 12
Two 55-minute sessions for each year group, starting from evidence that already exists in a student’s life.
Students arrive at careers sessions knowing they're supposed to figure something out. Most sessions give them a framework and send them home. These sessions give them a question they haven't been asked before, then another, then another, until something lands that actually belongs to them.
Our work explores what students are already doing, already noticing, already being called on for, whether anyone has named it or not. They draw upon strengths they've built outside the classroom, patterns they've never connected to a career direction, and capabilities that belong on a university application but have never made it onto one.
Sessions in this pathway include:
Year 10
What Your Phone Already Knows: students treat their own phone as evidence and leave with their top four values and three moments that back them up.
What Your Favourites Give Away: students work out what gives them energy and leave with a strengths collage and a strengths story that sounds like them.
Year 11
Who You Are When Nobody’s Watching: students find the gap between what a person is known for and what they actually did, and leave with a workbook and a letter.
The Part Nobody Assigned: students separate what was handed to them from what was always theirs, and leave with a one-page map of their evidence and a line about what they would want to be remembered for.
Year 12
What They’ve Been Telling You All Along: students gather what other people have already said about them and answer “So, tell me about yourself?”
Who Would Vouch for You: students write a short reference about themselves in the voice of someone who got them right, and send a thank-you to one person who helped them.
Each session has its own student notebook, and schools choose which year groups to book.
WHERE YOU'RE GOING: Individual or Group Guidance
International university applications: US, UK, EU, and Asia.
Most school counsellors manage international applications alongside a full domestic caseload. These sessions are built by someone whose entire focus is international pathways.
Students applying to universities in the US, UK, Europe, or Asia are navigating systems that work differently from each other and differently again from the Australian domestic process. The Common App is not UCAS. A US personal essay is not a UK personal statement. An Asian university application has different requirements again. Getting the system wrong wastes the application.
These sessions cover what each system actually requires, where Australian students consistently make avoidable mistakes, and how to build an application that works for the specific institutions on a student's list.
Sessions include university system orientation for US, UK, EU, and Asian institutions, personal statement and college essay development, interview preparation, scholarship application support, and school holiday intensive sessions for students with imminent deadlines.
Available as single sessions, small group workshops, or individual consulting. School holiday intensives available for students with time-sensitive applications.
BACKGROUND
Twenty years in education. Fifteen teaching English and Film. Five as Head of Careers at Newington College. Now running leadership and career development programmes in the corporate sector through StoryShift Collective, including work with Microsoft's graduate programme in Amsterdam.
Whether the session is identity work with a Year 10 cohort or a school holiday intensive with a Year 12 student whose Common App deadline is six weeks away, the approach is the same. Specific questions. Real answers. Language students can actually use.
LET'S TALK ABOUT YOUR PROGRAMME:
Whether you need someone for a careers day, a leadership programme, a wellbeing week, or a semester-long series, let's chat.
I also run professional development programmes for teachers and school leaders. Learn more here.
Student Careers Programmes