High Schoolers Set Up for Uni Success

The annual Future You Summit introduces senior secondary students to the real world, ensuring students make good decisions about their future studies by providing hands-on experiences inside QUT.

The summit is useful for students from outside Brisbane, as it offers them a week to familiarise themselves with the university and the city itself and expands the skill sets of the selected high schoolers by introducing them to exciting topics and industries beyond the syllabus.

Townsville student Tara Budai who attended said, “The whole event eased my mind a lot about what university would be like for me and how high school and university differ in terms of structure, workload, and social life which should seriously help with the adjustment next year.”

The summit focussed on the theme of 'Future Frontiers', looking ahead to the in-demand careers of the future and the skills the next generation will need to be equipped with.

The attendees were divided into 11 different streams to suit their interests and aptitudes, each covering real QUT study areas. Within each stream, the students were led through four practical experiences, each taking a deep dive into a specific subject and industry.

The activities varied greatly from stream to stream, but some examples were:
Advanced Technologists stream - Esports Ecosystem: A hands on look at sports technology and broadcasting integration, including esports production, camera work and design.
Experimentalists stream - Earth Science: Interactive (messy!) session learning about volcanoes, magma, lava flows and eruptions.
Design Disruptors stream - Engineering, planning and design: Students took a site tour of the Kangaroo Point bridge with Site Engineers to talk through the design features of the bridge, before completing a workshop to design their own.

The summit began with an orientation day, followed by two days covering four subject sessions, each led by industry leaders and educators and concluded with an Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, including a pitch-off challenge for the students to get involved by presenting their own ideas, as well as networking with alumni and investors, and inspiring keynotes with high-profile speakers.

Students heard from QUT alumni throughout the event, learning about their career journey and advice to unlock their future potential.

Rowena Barrett from QUT says, “I received amazing unsolicited feedback from students. The opportunity to meet new people, to get hands-on, to do things differently was highly valued. You could see this in the connections students made between challenges they wanted to address and the UN Sustainable Development Goals in their pitches.

“Students loved the opportunity to research, to use entrepreneurship to see across disciplines and to work together with new people. I was so thrilled to see the response of the participants to the 11 QUT Student Ambassadors who guided the streams. Such respect, with a long applause for the Ambassadors when they came on stage on Friday afternoon. 2-4 years ago the Ambassadors were where the participating students in the Summit were. It was wonderful to see both groups seeing the possibilities for the future.

“We had pitches about health and Indigenous health, about bridging the regional-metro divide, about waste, about ways to save the environment, about mental health, about younger and older folks working together, about energy, about respectful relationships at work. The diversity of ideas was extraordinary.”

Tara Budai says, “I decided to attend the Future You Summit because my Ancient History teacher Ms Thomson sent it to me because she thought I would enjoy and benefit from it. From there I researched it a lot more, I studied the website, and I realised that attending could be quite beneficial for me. I would not only immerse myself in different areas of study but also gain experience in university life from real university alumni. So, I decided ‘why not?’ and applied.

“I was a part of the Critical Creatives stream at the summit, so my activities included the areas of Advertising, Media Communications, Fashion, and Industrial Design. I found the media communications discipline session the most interesting as we learnt about the ins and outs of advertisements and how social media feeds are tailored specially to individual users based on the algorithm. I learnt some really interesting information about how that area of the media works and now I’ve started to notice the ads I receive and how they might be similar to each other depending on what I’m looking at on social media. We were also shown the real-world studies that happen in numerous industries that stem from the way social media impacts lives and how these studies have been used to improve everyday life.

“I gained valuable knowledge about university life and how different areas of university actually interact with each other. The stream leaders who were current university students were incredibly helpful and answered any and every question we had about QUT to the best of their ability. We learnt all about scholarships which really reduced a lot of the stress that came with my decision to move away from Townsville.