Nov
My time at SUSU
The last two weeks saw us welcome St Anne’s Catholic School pupil, Freya McManus to SUSU as part of her work experience placement. Here she shares how she found her time with us, including some of the weird and wonderful things she got up to!
I am definitely not the hardest worker ever: I spend most of my time daydreaming, I’m shy, talking to strangers makes me nervous and because of this I have never really enjoyed school. But over last two weeks, I started to understand that school isn’t everything and that work is completely different. I have found confidence and even though I was very nervous at times, I have talked to new people and very soon I felt comfortable in their presence and for this I thank everyone for being so friendly and welcoming.
Throughout the past two weeks, I have helped out with lots of different tasks including creating spreadsheets, writing articles for the SUSU website and painting a cardboard house! Not everything I did was completely unfamiliar but doing them in a work environment was new for me, and the main difference, which made it much more enjoyable, was the fact that what I was doing, I was doing for a reason. Unlike school, where my attitude towards more things than I care to say, is not very positive, I felt like I had purpose, I loved the fact that what was doing was actually important and was needed for something.
Whilst being at SUSU, I have learnt things that they don’t teach in schools. I have learnt that it is not your knowledge that gets you places but your attitude. Even though my mum works at SUSU and talks about it a lot, I have only just realised that, work is much more different to school than I ever imagined; but it has made me look forward to when it is my time to finally get out into the working world.
At age 14, I am the only person my age to ever to do their work experience at SUSU and I hope that others get this opportunity because I know they will get a lot out of it. So, once again I want to thank everyone involved for allowing me to have this great opportunity as I am sure I will look back and value it in the future.
Words: Freya McManus
Tags: St Anne's Catholic School, work experience
