No tags yet.
By Quang Thien Dang, Bachelor of Commerce
When I first started my study at Macquarie University online during the pandemic, I was still back in my home country, Vietnam. Back then, I was someone who liked a new sheet. I didn’t know about the university, the educators, university friends and colleagues, and an abundance of experience like I am now. I am now a third-year student last semester with the knowledge and experience to advance my accounting career journey once I graduate. Yet, the beginning of those is when I officially joined the Global Leadership Program (GLP).
There is something similar back in my country to the GLP program, which is the Training program scheme implemented in Vietnamese universities where it is mandatory. Every student strives to achieve high Training points in that scheme to receive rewards and sometimes financial incentives such as scholarships. I also love participating in extracurricular activities and researching the GLP and its activities. I will make many friends and contribute positively to society while learning new things. Plus, having GLP on my academic records will help me not lose out to my peers and make a good impression on my future employers, so I think: “Why not, let’s join GLP!”.
In my GLP journey, I have participated in an abundance of activities. The first and foremost is participating in the career webinars where Tyree presented valuable tips and showed me how to take advantage of LinkedIn, how powerful it was, and how being active brings enormous benefits to my career endeavours, for which I am very thankful. I have been striving to follow his guidance, enforcing it through participating in Fred Schebesta and Dr Samuel Bannister’s speeches, which helped remind me of how I need to continuously study and improve to become the better version of myself every day. Second of all is my recent Sustainability Module, which I completed in October of this year. This module has helped me learn a lot about how to become more sustainable throughout my daily activities, including how I can reduce wastage on food and clothes purchases and recycling. The module, coupled with GLP-organised colloquia and the recent Melbourne Futures Climate Summit I participated in, taught me about the adverse effects of political and social landscape changes. It helped me understand how to be on the right track to become more sustainable and help shape a more positive community outcome, finally, as a Reach MQ executive. Being an executive has helped me make many friends, and I was surprised that I got the birthday cake, which made me happy and feel more like I belong here in Australia.
At Reach, we run compassionate projects, and during one event, we participate in the aged care gifting activity of the society, I now know how it feels like to be alone during old age, and also the smiles, the laughs, the joys along with sadness with the tears of the elders to receiving our gift, which I remember the most. Or even when we (me with the red shoes) give out cards to Bear Cottage to express our appreciation to the staff and everyone here for their fantastic work helping the disadvantaged in our community.
Overall, my experience with GLP has been fruitful, and I love my journey thus far. I promise to continuously improve while driving positive social outcomes, contributing to a brighter future.
Last but not least, my tips to new students who are unfamiliar with Australia and its way of life: Join GLP and let it help you go with the flow, which I mean by joining as many activities as you can – whether that is undertaking a virtual internship of your dream career (I for one undertake the Audit Virtual Internship from Grant Thorton, and do it with a clear and happy mind!), career sessions from Tyree, be a volunteer translator of your mother tongue or your second language, join a society you like (I join Reach MQ as an executive, and now I have been friends with everyone on the team and also with other members while contributing to the social cause) or getting to know about Canberra through its symposium program – and from there hopefully you can be more familiar to Australia, as you will never know where life gets you!
Comments