Student spruikers
by Vincent Ciccarello
Three UniSA regional student ambassadors are showing others that there’s more than one way to get to Uni.
For years, regional communities around Australia have been suffering the effects of their young people leaving to make their futures in big cities. But, as three third-year students at UniSA’s Mount Gambier Regional Centre prove, local access to higher education has the potential to turn that around.
Rowena Darmanin, David Hill and Stacey-Lee Chuck are so enthusiastic about studying "at home" in Mount Gambier that they signed up as UniSA Student Ambassadors to spread the word to others.
"The presence of UniSA here is huge," Darmanin, who is studying a Bachelor of Social Work, said.
"It’s changing the way kids are thinking at school, that they don’t have to leave to get a good education. A lot of the kids who are thinking about doing university studies are actually thinking about doing it here now."
Darmanin said she was a "stay-at-home mum" of four kids who saw the arrival of UniSA as a chance to follow through on something she’d always wanted to do.
"I’m interested in the social work areas of children and mental health. I’m actually on placement at Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.
"I left school before I finished my SACE. I had an accident and tripped on the pavement and hurt my neck. I went into the workforce, worked as a Macca’s chick before I had my first baby and then I stayed at home for six years.
"My entry was through the Special Tertiary Admissions Test (STAT). I did well in that and so here I am!"
Business student David Hill left school in Year 10, moved into the workforce and undertook some tertiary studies while working in Adelaide.
"My wife and I moved backed to Mount Gambier and I was continuing that tertiary education, at diploma level, and then decided to look at a degree," he said.
"I found out that a business degree was on offer here, so I switched to UniSA and haven’t looked back since."
Hill said that doing the degree enabled him to gain employment at the local Regional Development Board, which brings him into contact with "other mature people who all of a sudden realise there’s a ‘face-to-face’ university campus here where they can come to study.
"And they are realistically now considering it, whereas beforehand, doing distance education just wasn’t an option, so they weren’t bothering."
Hill already has an MBA in his sights – and possibly a PhD beyond that.
Nursing student Stacey-Lee Chuck lives in Tarpeena, about 15 minutes from Mount Gambier.
"I’ve lived there all my life and I’ll probably never leave. I’m a country girl, so if this uni hadn’t come up, I wouldn’t have gone to uni – so that was a big bonus," she said.
After completing Year 12 at Grant High School, Chuck worked for a little while at the Tarpeena Roadhouse.
"I wasn’t going anywhere, I wasn’t doing anything. I waited a year after the campus opened and then I enrolled. It created a lot of opportunities for me. I now work at the Penola Hospital, where I’m a carer with the aged."
Chuck is keen to spread the good news about UniSA to secondary students.
"We’d like to get out to the schools when all the SATAC applications are happening, to let the students know that there are so many different pathways to uni," she said.