On Tuesday, the Year 9 leaders attended Altitude Day. The day was a positive education experience for Middle College leaders across the Sunshine Coast. Altitude Day aims to nurture and empower young people so they can do remarkable things and flourish.
Following are accounts of the day from Georgia Harle and Jack Clark.
Georgia Harle, Year 9:
The first guest speaker was a very inspiring young lady named Jordyn Archer who received the Young Australian of the Year award in 2014, at just 22 years old. During her talk, she gave us five tips about life and how we should go about living it.
- Find what inspires you – it can be anything you want it to be. Never once did Jordyn say that school grades or your background affects what you have the potential to be and, with enough passion and ambition, we can do whatever we want.
- Move outside your comfort zone, to grow and to do more. She explained that people who just let the days slip by never did anything spectacular with their lives and that we could be different.
- Don't limit yourself. Jordyn said that we shouldn't limit ourselves to what everyone else is telling us to do if we don't agree, because we can do amazing things in this world.
- Live out your passion and be confident in your capabilities.
- Never stop challenging yourself and do something now!
The biggest thing I took away from her speech was that there are simple things we can do right here in our local community to help out. It doesn't have to be a large-scale act of kindness, it can be as simple as giving a can of food or a gold coin to an organisation, which helps them to change the world.
Before the guest speaker presentations, the yLead team gave an introduction on how we can make a difference to the world around us. The yLead team talked to us about possibilities and potential. We had to write down 10 goals for high school. Many of us had things like getting our driver’s licence, or making a particular sporting team, or achieving good marks at school. One of the main instructors, Matt, talked to us about a scale – at one end was ‘possible’ and at the opposite end was ‘actual’. In between the two ends was empty space, which he called ‘potential’. He explained how we can turn the ‘possible’ into ‘actual’ by using the ‘potential’ we have and the opportunities we are given. He then gave us four keys to unlocking potential:
- Live your passions. This includes having conversations with people who we wouldn't normally talk to and also travelling to places with a different culture to ours.
- Challenge yourself. We wrote down something that we really wanted to do, how we are going to get there and what challenges we might face along the way.
- Recruit mentors. This includes communicating with people around us who have experienced the same things that we are looking to do in the future.
- Make a plan and take action. We wrote down all the things we are going to do and we talked about making a game plan and following it to get results.
I believe the most important thing we learnt from the yLead team is that in order to succeed, we need to fail first and not give up. We can use our failures to learn and grow stronger.
Jack Clark, Year 9:
On Tuesday, the Year 9 leaders had the opportunity to join other Middle College leaders from the Sunshine Coast at Altitude Day. The leadership conference taught how to reach our goals, empower ourselves as student leaders, unlock our true potential and make a difference in the world we live in. We listened to presentations by influential people such as Jordyn Archer (Young Australian of the Year 2014), Barnaby Howarth (Former AFL Swans player) and Rowie McEvoy (richest women under the age of 40). These truly inspirational people taught us their life lessons. Some of my favourite life mottos from Barnaby Howarth were; “Make everything big in your life small”, “Find what inspires you and do something about it”, and “Be a good bloke”. We should all take these mottos into consideration as we face our daily challenges, some of which are a lot harder than others. Barnaby Howarth had suffered a stroke and was also diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. He showed us his videos during rehabilitation. During his recovery, Barnaby turned his big problems into small problems, which then enabled him to conquer his daily challenges.
We then listened to Rowie McEvoy who taught us the A, B, C, D and E to life, how to achieve them and how we can become better people.
A: attitude,
B: beautiful,
C: courage,
D: discipline, and
E: excellence.
Mr Brendan Delaney, Director of Students
This Sunday, Middle and Senior College students will be collecting for the Salvation Army as part of the Red Shield Appeal. Over the past fortnight, College families have also donated food and other items so that they can better support those in need on the coast. Our community’s support of the Salvation Army is an easy and important way for us to make a difference for many local people. It is a special relationship that has been strengthened by the mutual generosity of our community and the Salvation Army. Once again, I have been impressed by the large collections in different classrooms across the College. Thank you to everyone for playing your part well and in particular to Mr Brendan Delaney, Miss Kim Stone and Mr David Druery for their leadership of this relationship and to our staff, students and parents for your generosity. 
