I’m John Jersekovsky, and I’m a USQ student.

I think it was in my first class of BP, which is Business Principles, in grade 8, and I managed to find the problem first before everyone else, and I was like “Yeah! I know I can do this!”, and I like maths. I finished school, moved to Brisbane, did a lot of waiting and kitchen work there, came back to Toowoomba, and that was when I realised, yeah, I’m not getting any younger. I think that it’s time that I started trying to get this career that I really wanted to excel in on track. Cause I had two main goals in life; either to become a chef, or to become an accountant, and accountancy was my main passion. It’s funny, but I like the idea of guiding people in making the right financial decisions. There’s no grey shade to it; you’re either wrong or you’re right. It adds up, or it doesn’t. I don’t know, I just really like it. It’s really hard to explain. I worked in an accounting firm in my first few years of uni. So what I learned at uni was also the basic knowledge of what I was doing at the firm. So over the years I’ve kind of realised that it’s taken longer than it should be, so I’ve stopped working full-time now, and I’m focussing on my studies.
There’s a lot of resources here for me at my finger tips. The 24 hour access computer room, the library which I use a lot, I come here to study. There’s a Japanese garden where you can chill out if you want to get away from it all.

Cameraman: Is this your home away from home?

John: [Laughs] Pretty much!

I live with my sister and her family. Obviously, with kids around it’s hard to study so I come to uni, not to get away from the lovely ones, but just to focus, and get what I need to get done. Over time I deferred, obviously and I’ve come back, and I’ve studied externally as well as on-campus, so there’s lots of ways that you can do a course at USQ. Everything is pretty much in your hands, and it’s just how you use it.

For all this hard work, my end-game is to get into a corporate company, work my way up the ladder, and see how I high I can get up there, as fast as possible. That is the plan!