Study News

Five Gold Coast students were recently acknowledged for their outstanding achievements and their impact on our city at the Gold Coast Student Excellence Awards.

Now in their third year, the Awards were established to recognise the valuable contributions that students make to the wider benefit of our community and how they enrich the cultural fabric of our lives. The award categories are: Championing Diversity, Fostering the Creative Arts, Protecting Our Environment, Enhancing Our Communities and Peer to Peer Support.

This year’s winners covered a broad scope of achievements, from building social and public speaking skills through drama to working with disabled children and a raft of initiatives advocating for gender equality.

Australian Pacific College has been training international and domestic students across Australia for almost 30 years in vocational courses from travel and tourism through to project management. Their Gold Coast campus is in the heart of Surfers Paradise, just a few minutes’ walk from the beach, and its latest showpiece is the Creative Design Hub, an initiative developed and supported through Study Gold Coast’s Education Vision Project Fund.

The Creative Design Hub was officially launched with a fashion parade showcasing the work of two Gold Coast labels, Circa Collective and Why Mary. Australian Pacific College Assistant Academic Manager for Design Rachel Hawkins says she wanted to stage an event to create awareness about the new facility and its potential for students. 

“We are here, we have an amazing facility and we have a space we want to share with industry to engage with us while showcasing our incredibly talented students”, Rachel says.

Devasehnan Archunan originally planned to pursue a career in tourism, but just after he attained his Tourism Management degree in Malaysia the COVID-19 pandemic arrived and effectively shut down the international tourism industry. While weighing up his options Deva decided to accompany his grandfather on a trip to Australia, who wanted to visit Deva’s uncle on the Gold Coast.

As Deva had spent much of his young life caring for his grandparents, he began to consider the prospect of a career in the sector.

“COVID was a turning point in my life because it impacted the tourism industry so significantly and I began to reconsider my career path”, Deva says. “Taking care of your family members is an Asian tradition and something I had already been doing at home with my grandmother and grandfather, so I thought why not take care of people as a career?”

Kool Kids Training College have commenced construction on a new teaching facility in Southport. While inspecting the construction work this week, College Manager Sam Hendry was excited about the potential of the new facility.

“We are planning for a time in the not-too-distant future when we can welcome students back into our training rooms – both domestic and international. This vision of delivering the best training facility in Early Childhood Education and Care sector in Australia is taking shape and our students will love it!”, Sam said.

The new Kool Kids Training College will boast 153 square metres of floor space with two state of the art technologically equipped training rooms featuring presenter tracking cameras delivering enhanced interactivity for students studying online. The facility will also include a substantial collaborative meeting space for post lecture review sessions, as well as an onsite gym.

Envirotech Education recently commenced two new courses to make marine science more accessible than ever before. The Certificate II (for high school students) and Certificate III courses in Marine Habitat Conservation and Restoration were developed by Envirotech when they realised there were significant gaps in the marine conservation and restoration fields in Australia.

The courses were established because the only existing pathways were through either on the job training or via an academic degree. According to Envirotech many people with lower-level skills are in practical positions working in marine conservation, resulting in high salary expenses and wasted resources for employers, government and the community.

Both Certificate II and III are designed for students who may not have earned university enrolment but have a desire to learn marine-based working skills and who wish to take professional leadership in community marine restoration work and to empower communities to participate in protecting local marine environments.

A group of like-minded young women have started a new support group for women studying STEM subjects at Griffith University. The idea to create Griffith WiSE - Women in STEM and Education was formed by four students after attending a professional development workshop.

Tiahna Cave (Data Science and Applied Maths), Kaylen Haua (Business and Environmental Science), Alison Butcher (Computer Science) and Angela Dunn (Civil Engineering) were discussing their respective fields of interest when it occurred to them that they should be doing more to support women studying in their subject areas.

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting international border closures the Gold Coast education sector has instigated numerous digital initiatives to maintain our relationships with our overseas partners through the implementation of virtual exchange programs with considerable success.

Recently, China’s Beijing No 25 Middle School approached Study Gold Coast to see if it was possible to implement a marine conservation program for their students with a particular focus on coral bleaching, loss of biodiversity and the reduction of the human ecological footprint within marine habitats.

Designed to coincide with the UN’s World Ocean Day (June 8), the school was actively seeking insights as to how other countries dealt with their environmental issues in a bid to better understand how our marine resources can be managed more carefully.

Khairul Alam arrived in Australia in 2014, originally studying for his PhD in Newcastle before accepting an engineering job in Melbourne, but his real passion in life has always been dentistry. For numerous reasons his career path led him down a different road, but with the advent of COVID-19 he began to reassess his life and career priorities.

Dentistry has always been Khairul’s lifelong dream, he even married a dentist, but until now he hasn’t had the opportunity to pursue his goal. It was while he and his young family were in lockdown that he began to explore his options and he heard about Study Gold Coast’s Student Accommodation Grant, which provides up to 10 weeks’ accommodation for students who want to relocate to the Gold Coast to study.

When local Gold Coast radio personality, Christo was challenged by country music star Casey Barnes to produce a country song in just three minutes he turned to TAFE Queensland for help. The 102.9 Hot Tomato breakfast show host collaborated with music and sound production students from TAFE Queensland’s Coomera campus to record the vocals, play instruments and input creative direction to produce a high quality track in one of the campus recording studios. 

Within weeks of it being officially released, the song titled ‘I Don’t Care (I Want My Dog Back)’ hit #3 on the Australian iTunes Country Music Chart behind global superstars Keith Urban and Dolly Parton.