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STUDENT INTEREST
A WORD FROM ME TO YOU Written by Travis Wilson, James Cook University Graduate
A friend asked if I wanted to write a piece for JCUSA’s illustrious student paper of life after graduation, I said “Yes”; but wasn’t sure what to tell you. I could go down the line of my personal experiences and make it intimate, or make it utterly unrelated to myself going by what other students have experienced. It’s not really in me to write about myself, I hate it, but they say do things that make you feel uncomfortable like making a life after bouncing from education to education. I never stopped studying from when I started school to the end of my uni degree. Yet, I detested school. I used to dread the mornings. If I waited it out, I might be able to extend the time a little between when I open my eyes to when I’m eying another student as their parents drop them off. Instead of learning, I’d spend the days drawing worlds, writing lore, creating silly little romances in my head or my book. So you can guess it was a pretty big shock when I said to my parents I wanted to study further. My sister chose to do tertiary study off to the side, my close cousins all chose trades. I wanted to become a technical nerd and engineer, helping the world build technology for the future. We were drawn in with the flashy ads of “What you can do in the future!” I got into the world of Information Technology in 2015, thinking it would open up the world of engineers and higher-level programmers to me. It inspired me to push toward my original plan of building smaller UAV and UGV for law, fire and rescue; that was a long term professional investment into my study. Previously I had the childhood dream of becoming a game developer. I’m writing this almost five years later, and hopefully, soon I will attend my graduation ceremony. I finished my degree in the first semester in 2019; we had to wait ‘til the end of 2020 to graduate. A week before the ceremony, we were forced into lockdown, and all JCU events called off. I’ve always been pretty unlucky, but I never called for a 2-year break between degree and graduation. But as I’m writing to you, 26th of March, cross your fingers!
Let’s hope Covid doesn’t take a massive u-turn in 2021. Well, that’s a little about my life in the study frontlines, not much different from anyone else, hard fighting and studying. Now we are all sort of drilled into at a young age, that uni will be our decider, school will determine your life. Like the cartoons we used to watch where kids would fill out a test and be told “WHO YOU ARE!” Receiving the exact opposite of what they hoped. This viewpoint is not entirely true. Tertiary education paves the way for you to branch. While I may not be a qualified engineer, I am a self-proclaimed engineer and programmer. I have studied cars, planes, boats, engines, motors, turbines, light, radar-lidar, satellites, you-name-it; for months on end after my degree. Where you take your study is where you are going to take yourself. For someone who never really understood how to stand in the right lane, going to uni has helped push me a direction and taught me the basics of taking the steps. When I left school, the subjects I aced were: English and Art, and if I got better grades, science would be there too. I passed below B average in every other subject, just enough to get my Overall Position to get into uni. I had no idea where I wanted to go. Writer, Artist, Game developer, so many opportunities, but in the artistic industry it takes a backup to keep you on your feet for the time being while to work up to your project. I knew deep down I had a drive for storytelling though.
