Sydney Life

This place is really nice.

But there are other nice things in life too.

My younger sister and my father made a nine-hour drive to attend several of the universities on Wednesday 3rd January during their respective information days.

After they had finished and were waiting for a bus at Central, a journalist with a microphone and tape recorder approached. He was putting together a story to be aired that night on ABC radio, and he needed some vox pops from members of the public. Would they like to comment?

Sure, said my brother, who had come along for the afternoon. So the journalist asked him a few questions and taped the answers. Afterwards, Dad asked the journo how he got involved with the job he was doing.

“Well” the guy said, “I spent six years in the army. After I got out of there, I went and asked the ABC for a job. They said they didn’t have anything for me, so for the next six months I lived off the dole and went in everyday to the ABC and did whatever work was available, for free. Eventually, they gave me a job.”

Dad glanced at my sister, who had just spent the day speaking to faculty representatives and ex-students at two different universities, and hopes to study journalism next year. “So you didn’t go to uni at all then?”

The journalist shook his head. “Nah mate. What they really want is people who are willing to get in there and give it a go.”

Of course this is not a story intended to cast a slur on university degrees. I haven’t made an overnight paradigm shift into talkback radio muckraking and I’m certainly not brandishing the tall poppy secateurs. Rather, it’s about utilising your alternatives. Life might not serve up a piping hot opportunity buffet -- you might end up with the cold Four’n’Twenty pie of career options. But chuck on a bit of Gravox and a few peas and you’ve got yourself a pie floater right there!

And with advice like that, I should be a school guidance counsellor! Ha.