I started at Emanuel School in 2010 and finished the HSC there in 2022. It’s a K-12 school, so while there were plenty of new students who joined throughout the years, there was no big “Year 7 reset” where everyone arrives from different schools and re-sorts themselves. At a school like this, the same kid you sat next to in kindergarten is quite possibly still sitting next to you at the graduation ceremony.
I’ve been back there after graduating for music work - both for the annual music camp performances and regular band tutoring, so I’ve had a few years to work out which bits of it actually stuck.
What I studied
By the HSC, I’d ended up studying:
- English Advanced (2 units)
- Mathematics Advanced (2 units)
- Modern History (2 units)
- Extension History (1 unit)
- Music 2 (2 units)
- Extension Music (1 unit)
- Software Design and Development (2 units)
Software Design and Development
Software Design and Development was the subject that ended up mattering most, and not just because the syllabus was especially deep. It was the successor to Information Software Technology, which I studied as an elective for a few years prior to the HSC. While I had created plenty of programming projects in the earlier years, Year 12 SDD was the first time I wrote code that really seriously felt like it would be read and assessed. Being made to learn & use an Agile workflow, plan before writing, document what I built, test it against someone else’s expectations rather than my own, and had it in finished rather than interesting. These are habits that continued to stick with me as I try my best to build polished, well-documented, and usable programs.
The project itself was a live bus tracker for Sydney: pull in live bus positions and traffic data, and build a route from A to B out of them. Alongside it, I’d also built a third-person car racing game in Unity. I don’t have either of them anymore - no repo, no backup, which is its own lesson and one I only learnt once. What I do remember is that while I had expected the interface to be the hardest part of the bus project, it was actually dealing with real transport data (which is often late, missing, or blatantly wrong) and the program having to keep producing an answer anyway.
The two extension courses were the ones that cost the most time. History Extension isn’t really a history course, it’s a course about how history gets written, who decides what counts as evidence, and why two credible people reading the same sources end up with incompatible accounts. I spend a lot of it confused and annoyed, and I’ve since worked out that “where did this claim come from and how much weight does it hold” is a question I use constantly. My major work was a historiographical paper on communism and socialism, largely built around Thomas Sankara’s actions in Burkina Faso. Thomas Sankara is a figure whose reputation especially depends on who’s doing the writing - which was rather the point of the paper.
Music 2 and Extension Music involved both composition and performance, so a good share of Year 12 was spent writing pieces rather than just playing them. Saxophone covered the performances side, but the composition side was the first time I had to produce something original to a brief and a deadline, defend the choices in it, and accept that “I liked how it sounded” wasn’t a real justification. I’d written pieces before (in earlier music classes, and on my own for fun) but never with someone externally marking the reasoning behind them. Two compositions came out of Extension Music, each a few minutes long. I still have both, as MuseScore exports rather than live recordings - so what you’re hearing is the notation played back, not a room full of people.
English and Modern History did the less glamorous work of making me write a lot, under time pressure, for a reader who I knew nothing about.
What I actually got out of it
The music program, mostly. Concert bands, ensembles, rehearsals before & after school, and the three residential camps that I later went back to work at from the other side. Playing in a badn is a strange skill to put on a résumé but it teaches something genuinely useful: you have to listen to what everyone else is doing while still doing your own part correctly, and if you drop out to fix your own mistake the whole thing falls over. I’ve been in plenty of group projects since where that was the entire problem.
The other thing was the sheer repetition of writing. Essays, long responses, drafts handed back covered in red pen. At 17 years old, it felt like a tax on the subjects I actually cared about. Then my first job out of school was technical writing and it turned out that being able to explain a concept clearly, in order, to someone who doesn’t already understand it, is a rarer skill in tech than I expected.
How it shaped where I ended up
Three ‘threads’ came out of school more or less intact.
Code
Software Design and Development made a very clear straight line from high school to a Bachelor of Computing Science at UTS, and then to my cybersecurity and networking major. I didn’t know security existed as a career when I was in Year 12 - I just knew I liked the subject where you built things that either worked or didn’t. I also ended up circling back to the bus project without meaning to: years later, I was building routable road networks out of OpenStreetMap data at university in Beijing, which is the same problem I’d fumbled through at seventeen, with better tools and some idea of what I was doing.
Teaching
This one surprised me. I came back to Emanuel in 2023 as a music tutor and spent three years doing one-on-one lessons, sitting in on ensemble rehearsals, and working the same music camps I’d been a student at. Teaching a ten-year-old child to read a key signature is excellent training for teaching a ten-year-old why their Python loop never ends. I then started leading coding classes at Code4Fun. The useful part of that job isn’t necessarily just knowing a few important programming languages, but rather working out which of the five possible misunderstandings a student might be having in any given moment. I learnt that in a practice room at my old school,m not at university.
Writing
The third ‘thread’ is writing, which went from English essays to technical documentation at Elcom, and now to this site.
I don’t think I’d consider this a ‘nostalgia’ post. Plenty of school was tedious, and there are mountains of content I learned that I’ve never used since. But the parts that did last extended far beyond the content, rather the projects I had to finish, the bands I couldn’t let down, the essays I had to rewrite, and so on. Thirteen years is a very long time to spend anywhere, and that’s roughly what I came out with.