Student's Journal Reflection

Published on 17 December 2024

Day 1 Monday

This was our first day in the office. In the morning Austin almost got hit in the face accidentally because he stuck his head right in front of the door. We had visited before but this was our first time meeting the team, who are all lovely people. We got to speak in some depth with all of the staff members, and got mistaken for uni students. Perhaps we emanate maturity. We inspected the Monash Youth Services website and social media accounts for user engagement and relevance to people around our age. We also began brainstorming for a potential issue to post about on the Monash Youth Services Instagram account.

Day 2 Tuesday

We continued to work on our issue for social media, which we decided would be to encourage help-seeking for mental health difficulties amongst young people. Especially rejecting the associated stigma of help-seeking being a sign of weakness. During the brainstorm Charlize went through about thirty markers looking for the ‘yummiest’ one. For 16 Days of Activism against gender-based violence we took a photo for Youth Services Instagram account where we held up a sign that read ‘To us, respect is knowing that no-one owes you anything they’re not comfortable with’. We began a chalk art mural of angel wings for Youth Services end of year celebration event on Thursday afternoon. It was a challenging and long process which we did not complete in one sitting. Austin dropped or stepped on multiple pieces of chalk. After our work day was over we also attended a self-defence class run by Melbourne Taekwondo Centre, in which we discussed how to stay safe in public.

Day 3 Wednesday

We spent quite a while working on our chalk mural of angel wings, and ended up finishing right before our lunch break. The final product was pretty great and worth the effort. Hopefully, the mural is appreciate at the end of year celebration and despite our inexperience with chalk young people get some nice pictures with the wings. We also created little cards with dinosaur drawings and hid them around the building, including Herbert the Ankylosaurus and Stella the T-Rex for a scavenger hunt activity for the end of year celebration. The Team Leader, Bill, struggled to find any dinosaurs, though he impressed us by eventually finding one.

Day 4 Thursday

We finished working on our Instagram post project about the stigma behind mental health and help seeking. We helped prepare for the end of year celebration by making a playlist and assisting staff with miscellaneous tasks. We also took photos of ourselves with the wings to be posted on the MYS social media. At the celebration, Charlize waved to a baby and the baby giggled. When Austin waved to the same baby, the baby crawled away in a hurry. Unfortunately, only a few people did our scavenger hunt.

Overall thoughts:

Work experience at Monash Youth Services was a fantastic experience! The people were lovely and the social media work was very interesting. It was a great environment and we are grateful to have been provided this opportunity.