I’m Shane, and I’m a USQ student.

I finished year 12, and I knew that I wanted to go to uni, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I figured I’d have a gap year. I worked full time for 12 months and got some money together. So after that year I went to uni. I started a Bachelor of Business. It gets, like, four months into it and I was not used to not having money around, and I thought I’d go back to work full time for the rest of the year. Just the hours you put in, and the sort of hard mundane work that hospitality is. I needed to do what I wanted to do in life, yeah...it wasn’t here.

I was actually pretty confident in coming back to uni because...I had a bit of an advantage on the other students actually, because I’d seen what it was like. I knew sort of... a bit about the course content.

Mum was actually pretty devastated when I left the first time. She thought that I would...I was the first of the family to finish uni. She was basically like, ‘you’ll figure it out one day’. She game me time and I came to it myself. I was living in an apartment, and I think I said, “When the lease runs out, I’ll go back”. She was pretty rapt, and she said, “There is always a spot at our place if you want to come back and you find it too hard”, they just live around the corner anyway. I pretty much eat there whenever I’m hungry.

When I was debating about what courses to take, I talked to Graham Young, my Marketing lecturer, and he basically said, “Well, you could do like a HR course, and that would give you the skills to deal with people. That would be really handy in owning your own business later on”. If you have any questions or any enquiries they can always have time for you. You’re always confident that they’re giving you the best advice they can.

The Fraser Coast campus is just around the corner so it’s a quick drive. I’ve got my work fitting around that, and my boxing training. It’s pretty cruisy. Pretty happy at this stage, coz I’ve got one year, sort of, under my belt and got some good grades for that. I’m stoked that I’ve found a balance between work and uni and I actually have some money left over at the end of the week, and I can sort of live pretty comfortably. In the long-term I’m hoping to own my own business, I’ll hopefully be my own boss. You work for most of your life, and there’s no point in doing something you’re not enjoying, and uni is just the perfect way to get to somewhere you want to be.