After finishing school at Emanuel I didn’t really leave. A few months later I was back as a music tutor and band assistant, on contract from 2023 through to the end of 2025, working in the same rehearsal rooms I’d spent most of my lunchtimes in as a student.
The regular work was one-on-one and small-group lessons, plus helping out with the school’s ensembles: running sections in rehearsal, setting up for performances, and generally being an extra pair of hands and ears for the music staff. Being only a few years older than the students made it an interesting middle position. They’d tell me things they wouldn’t tell a teacher, like what they actually practised that week, which was useful.
The biggest part of the job each year was music camp. The school runs a week-long residential camp, and in 2023, 2024 and 2025 I worked it full-time. That meant rehearsals from morning to night, sorting out logistics when things inevitably went sideways, and keeping a lot of teenagers on time and roughly in tune. It’s a long week, but watching a group go from sight-reading a piece on Monday to performing it properly by Friday never really got old.
Music has been a big part of my life for a long time. I was producing tracks for clients on Fiverr from the age of 14, so teaching it felt like a natural thing to do alongside uni. It also turned out to be good practice for Code4Fun. Whether it’s a scale or a for loop, the trick is the same: break it into small pieces, let them get one piece right, then build up.