From the 17th to the 21st of July, the Year 11s experienced their first taste of the world of industry: Work Experience. In this five day experience, students held internship positions at real companies ranging from law firms to bakeries, focusing on developing Students’ skills of finding, applying, and working within an industry.
One of these students, Csombor Balogh, was given the opportunity to work at RTHK radio 3 as an intern. In this time, he was working on a variety of projects and segments for the radio. These were things such as doing research on Hydrogen energy within Hong Kong for a news report, or working on a feature (a portion of radio time) to cover a platform to connect teenagers with local english based volunteering experiences. These experiences are coordinated with well known NGOs such as Soap Cycling and Birthday Happiness Asia, and focus on a long term nature to their commitments. Because of its agentic nature, this platform was named Teens4Change being developed by Mark Koung and Istal Rubio, Csombor being a member of said team as well. The feature was all about pushing teenagers to take the first step in making change in their local communities, as well as utilising their experiences and hobbies in the same way Mark Koung and Istal Rubio did as well.
Below is a drive link to listen to the feature:
It covers topics such as:
- What is Teens4Change?
- Why did you start Teens4Change? How did you identify the problem and act upon it?
- What makes you guys different?
- Was taking that first step really as hard as you expected, as many other teenagers think?
- What would you say to teens who are on the borderline of taking that first step?
And other little topics about being a student and initiating change.
However, this is one of the many examples of our students in the workplace, having many different roles and responsibilities as well. Many students enjoyed their work experience thoroughly and had many skills and talents on full display.
“I got to learn and experience a plethora of different skills and apply them,” – Justin Luo (Working at Sports performance physiotherapy)
“During this experience, there was a wealth of learning that took place for a student such as myself. Working within a professional work environment was not only engaging, but also taught me a variety of skills which were learnt from the workplace itself, and myself being in the workplace.” – Mark Koung (Working in the dental industry)
“Through the work experience week at Holborn Assets I was able to learn about financial terms and topics through the use of the presentation tasks the employees assigned me.” – Sebastian Lyons (Working at Holborn Assets)
These are just a few snippets of some of the incredible experiences from this wonderful opportunity. Below are many more:
Csombor Balogh:
At RTHK Radio 3, I was given the wonderful opportunity to work on a feature (a brief amount of time on the radio) to cover practically any topic I wished. I wanted to connect my experiences, engagement with the community and my friends to this opportunity. What came of it was discussing with my friends (interviewing them) about their experience with developing a platform to connect teenagers with local english based volunteering experiences. These experiences are coordinated with well known NGOs such as Soap Cycling and Birthday Happiness Asia, and focus on a long term nature to their commitments. Because of its agentic nature, this platform was named Teens4Change. At RTHK Radio 3, this feature was all about pushing teenagers to take the first step in making change in their local communities and utilising their experiences and hobbies.
Joey Wai
Glenealy ESF school
Field: teaching field
Tasks: Support students as a teaching assistant
Something that I learned about the job itself is that it not only requires the teacher to just be there and walk around checking on students, but it also requires leadership skills to guide the large number of students and also the time and patience to maintain a healthy and good relationship with students.
Something that I have practised on is my leadership skills, as I am usually more independent with my work and usually the teammate and not the team leader, this experience has allowed me to better understand the qualities needed for a leader. I also grew as a learner myself, by working on how I can better explain topics and things with patience to children who are also learning like how I did several years ago.
Sebastian Lyons
Holborn Assets: Holborn Property Investments is part of Holborn Assets, a leading international financial services company with over 20 years of experience in the finance industry.
Holborn Assets is in the field of financial management. The company sells financial products such as citizenship, property management, and more.
Through the work experience week at Holborn Assets I was able to learn about financial terms and topics through the use of the presentation tasks the employees assigned me. I created presentations regarding financial investments, property, and basic financial terms. I was also to receive a lesson from an expert in the social media team who taught myself how to create advert campaigns on social media. Following this, I was able to create a social media campaign advert for the platforms of Facebook and Instagram.
Overall this was an amazing opportunity/experience for myself as a learner.
Jacob Smith
During work experience, I have gone to Food Square Chai Wan, A factory where I learned about the production of various meats and the behind-the-scenes production supporting big companies such as Cathay Pacific, etc. I got interested for my first couple days to be a self learner and learn by influence of other workers showing me around. I did tasks such as packing and labelling packages that could be ordered in the thousands of kilograms of meat and various food products for large companies. I also learned about the actual chef and cooking side of how mass production of products are done, with it showing me the difference of the cooking of the meal to the preparation of the ingredients, such as wagyu to be set in a condition which is delectable to the consumers of the buyers, An example of this is Central Market which is being supplied by the Food Square Chai Wan for all of its needs and supplying the pre cooked food due to long thought through hours which make and prepare the products to be above the standard, giving the QOL (Quality Of Life) feature in the company. I have fully learned about the production steps with doing in person work on the production line, With also learning the various companies demands to support itself etc.
Alisia Kaye
For work experience, I was able to participate in an internship in Hk language school located in Wanchai. It is related towards the language field and I was given the task to film, edit videos to educate students about cantonese and mandarin. I was also able to sit in one of the beginner classes where I was able to watch the teacher teaching the Cantonese basics to a foreigner from France. During the internship, I was able to learn some new knowledge on the pinyin, tones of Cantonese as I am not familiar with it although I can speak it. Furthermore, I was able to recognise the privilege I have being bilingual as HongKong’s main languages are cantonese and english, making it easier for me to communicate and help others to translate, which is beneficial towards not only my future career, but towards my personal social life.
Tsam Yi Zhou
Company name: Union Hospital
Field: Medical
Tasks: Shadowing doctors
What did you learn?
Throughout my work experience, I learned how the EMC worked, specifically, how doctors communicate with patients, how nurses collaborate with doctors, and how the logistics work in a private hospital. An important principle of the medical field that I learned was that doctors are not in a position above nurses, all staff in the hospital should be treated as equal and work together through strong teamwork disregarding the superiority of one’s position.
What skills have you practised/learnt?
After my week of work experience, the skill that I have practised the most is my cantonese skills, as almost everyone in the hospital spoke cantonese. Moreover, another skill I learned was how to talk to people formally and professionally under a work environment.
Phoebe Morley
For my Year 11 Work Experience I had the great opportunity to work in a Barrister Chamber. This has been my second time working at Liberty Chambers in Hong Kong, and throughout I was able to analyse cases, understand HK Law and even go to court and meetings with Defendants. It was eye opening and I was able to cultivate my communication skills as well as teamwork skills as a lot of the experience was about double checking one another’s work and helping each other to work toward our goal for each case.
Bonnie Xiang
I worked at Art RoofTop Club for my work experience. It is a membership art studio located in Happy Valley. They work as a gallery and participate in art fairs like Art Central. While interning, I drafted emails to important clients, ordered art supplies from a company for the upcoming summer workshops, made an art fair proposal for ART SG (with the help of some others) and helped set up the candle auction. I also assisted in teaching kids and cutting out stencils for spray painting.
I learnt about the daily tasks that a studio had to do and it gave me greater insight on the specific type of job I wanted to do in the future. It also showed me a whole other world to the art business and how galleries and artists were able to work together to help each other make a living.
During my internship, I was able to practise my communication and collaboration skills. I worked with my team to get the tasks done and communicated with big companies and individual people, which helped increase those skills a lot.
Jeremy Hsu
This is a brief summary of my work experience. During the week of work experience, I worked at ESF Peak School as a PE EA with Mr Erwin. The experience was thoughtful for me and gave me a better knowledge of educators, which benefited me now and in the future as I would like to continue the teaching job in the future. In this experience, I learned to control my attitude and perform good well-being so that students do not learn bad habits from me. Furthermore, I was able to practise my teaching skills, organisation skills, time management as well as emotion management. This is because, throughout the work experience, I was helping the primary kids contribute to the class, which was an uneasy job for me since most of them were energetic, however, I was able to maintain my attitude and taught them with a more effective approach.
Jasmine Yeung
My name is Jasmine and the following is a summary of my work experience. I interned for the company Friday Everyday in the field of journalism. My main tasks were to research and write articles. From this, I gained more experience in what office life is like for a journalistic work field while gaining important technical skills that are specific to this job, including how to make an article/news item more clickable and appealing, as well as how to engage the audience. Additionally, I learned more about myself and my work attitude. From the past week, I have realised that I am a responsible and hard worker, and that I place great importance in completing my tasks to the best possible outcome in order to exceed expectations. I also practised skills like research, organisation, time management, and mainly independence; going into a new environment by myself and the ability to adapt.
Amitabh Joshi
My company’s name is Smith and Jain Dental Clinic. The field the workplace focused on was dentistry and medicine. My tasks and goals were to shadow, learn techniques and gain information from the clinic’s respective dentists. I learned a lot from this valuable experience, for example – I was able to view different types of procedures like Implants, root canals and cleanings, each of which I was able to extract knowledge from which was why are these procedures important, and what happens if you ignore the problem and don’t do these procedures. I helped the respective dentist I was shadowing by taking pictures of the patient’s teeth, which then the dentist analysed after the procedure was completed. Overall, I believe that this experience was extremely valuable for me as I gained a lot of knowledge and information about dentistry as a field and it could be a viable option for me in the future.
Shiven Soni
For work experience, I worked at Augventive Ltd. (augventive.com for more information). Augventive is a family office. At first I was sorting and summing (some) company expenses, I went to the AsianInvestor event, I had worked on supplying the company with unique and effective marketing techniques, the advantages and disadvantages of joining the various chambers of commerce in Hong Kong would be and each one’s unique traits which make each one server differing purposes for the company. I generally helped out around the office when my main tasks were finished. I learned effective and professional communication, the ability to dedicate myself to a task to the extreme where I entered some sort of flow, as well as some knowledge specifically around the market they work in. This also has extended past the week as they have offered to work with me with the neural network I built that very accurately predicts price movements ahead of time by about 60 hours.
Kasey Chiu
Company name: ANG Studios
Field: Architecture, Conservation
Tasks: Conduct research on historic sites, Visit architectural structures and reworkings of historic sites in order to create Condition reports, etc.
Throughout this experience, I learnt how to create condition reports of architecture sites, draw accurate representations of buildings, identify building defects and report on them. Personally, I built up my social skills in communication with my employer, organisation skills in ensuring completion of tasks and more. As well as this, due to the experience I further understand the field of architecture and how the particular field is like.
Maya Hirsch
My name is Maya and I am writing to share my experience during the past work experience week. Through the work experience week, I worked with the Jean M. Wong School of Ballet at the Tsuen Wan Branch, working as an assistant teacher and observing lessons between a wide variety of age groups such as pre-primary classes up to grade 8 classes which is the highest level of the RAD ballet syllabus excluding secondary levels. Some tasks I helped with included giving demonstrations to the students, observing the lessons, correcting students, and guiding students through syllabus work. Throughout this week, I learned a lot more about the job as I worked with children of many age groups and experienced a work life that begins at night or late afternoon. In terms of self-development, I learned that I don’t mind working with children and I also prefer a flexible and free schedule as I was able to have the entire day to myself while also getting to work on time. Because the lessons ended late at night between 7-8.30, I also found that I would prefer a job that is closer to my home as transportation is quite tiring and I also wouldn’t enjoy a standing job as even the simple action of standing for over an hour can be quite strenuous. I developed many reflective and self-evaluation skills as I reflected on my personal performance as well as the performance of students in class, I practised giving insightful and meaningful feedback and I learned to develop many skills and performance techniques through observing lessons. This week was a good experience for my personal growth and I was able to learn a lot about being in the work field, particularly related to dance.
