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| Deavon |
When I first contemplated going to university at 18, working in the Youth and Community sector was an area I had not even remotely considered as a potential career. In truth, I did not really have a concrete idea of where I wanted to take my life, so I followed a trend of the time and studied a HND in Business Information Technology. After I graduated I managed to get a really good job with an IT company and was determined to work up the corporate ladder. I don’t know, but maybe by luck, design and hard work, I got a really good reputation within the company, and I was given challenging roles with a wage which reflected the work I was doing. The thing was, I became disillusioned at work and some social problems I saw, such as black on black crime, how drug use was presented in the media and the idea that young people were admiring the wrong type of celebrities, affected me to the extent I actually became depressed.
I had reached a point in my life where I wanted to feel I was making a difference, but I didn’t know how. I was still working for the IT Company, but I began to mentor young males in my spare time. Mentoring sounds like I was giving my mentees some wise words of wisdom, but it really wasn’t like that. Mentoring to me involved lots of fun, going to different places of interest and making sure my mentees were safe in my company. I suppose I tried to make sure that I was good company to them. After two years of mentoring, I knew I wanted to work with young people on a more permanent basis, however I also wanted to ensure I was suitably qualified enabling me more freedom of choice in deciding the eventual avenue I would take. After 12 years of working in IT I had made the conscious decision to resign from work and return to study.
I contacted several universities, before deciding Greenwich was the institution I wanted to attend. I decided on Greenwich for several reasons, some personal and some professional. Some professional reasons were that I liked the idea of placement hours being conducted throughout the academic year as opposed to an intensive block and placement being throughout the three academic years, which in my mind translated to more practical experience I could sell to potential employers.
Within the first three weeks of my course, I knew I had made the right decision. The discussions we had in class, some extremely heated, made me feel alive in a social conscious way that I had not felt publically previously. Throughout the year we discussed and wrote assignments on various issues, some around identity, others on how politics and the law affected people from different social classes and a major talking point being the use of and abuse of power. The second year, building on the first has seen a lot more group work (challenging in itself) around delivering proposal presentations to apply for funding and there has been a lot more emphasis on Community Work understanding what it is and how education in the community takes place.
From day one, my classmates and myself have been asked to question ourselves as well as each other, and whilst this at times has been uncomfortable, I have found it a necessary process because as a youth worker we ask young people to question themselves, and how can we realistically ask someone to question themselves and their own thought processes if we don’t question and understand our own? An ‘in joke’ has started amongst my university class mates as it seems we have to do a LOT of reflection. Although an ‘in joke’ without the practical placement experience I have acquired on the course, I would not appreciate the importance of reflection within the workplace. Placement hours (600+ and counting!) has also made me a more confident worker, able to deal with situations I would not have known how to handle. When a young person approaches you, because they trust you and discloses information which you have to act on, you really do appreciate the hours you have put in and the trusted co-workers who have helped develop you along the way.
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