21 March 2025
Tuesday evening’s Senior School Careers Evening was a great success, and I would like to thank all those who helped the night run so smoothly, including Mr Cameron Hromin who drove the event as Assistant Careers Counsellor, our SPSC Events Team and also the external volunteers who assisted with guiding our current students across a range of career pathways.
It was particularly heartening to see a wide range of Old Scholars and SPSC parents giving up their own time to offer their wisdom and experience to our students; our School value of Service rings especially true on occasions like this. Our boys are lucky to be entering a global workforce where they can draw upon the resources of a diverse and engaged Old Scholar professional community. I discovered one recent graduate manning the SAPOL stall in full police uniform, which intimidated me more than I expected! Nevertheless, I was reminded of the power of our Old Scholars modelling career choices that speak so profoundly to community service.
The Headmaster’s message in his opening remarks was an important one: that boys should be wary of settling on a singular, fixed career pathway too soon, and that it is acceptable to be uncertain of what the rest of your life looks like. This uncertainty, he confided in the students, was a state of mind that many adults secretly shared!
Personally, I never imagined I would become a teacher. My brother, father and grandfather had all left school to study either Law or Medicine at the same university, but – to my parents’ and teachers’ credit – I never felt any pressure to do the same. I loved my schooling and was lucky enough to enjoy some success but, in terms of tertiary pathways, the things that gave me most joy were poetry, cricket and theatre, and I expected that I would naturally find my way into some un-named career that paid me a salary to do at least one of those things, after living out a few years of what I now recognise as a sort of Oxbridge undergraduate fantasy. My parents recognised this naivety fairly early and suggested I consider teaching, which led to a dreadful argument where – with a teenage petulance of which I am now ashamed – I told them I could never be a teacher because education was, in my own words (which I obviously find horrifying now), “intellectually regressive – you’re just telling someone else what you know already!” How little I understood the value and mechanics of education when I was in Year 9.
To Mum and Dad’s credit, they treated my outburst with grace and patience, and I remember them grinning slyly at one another. I probably stormed off to my room to recite poetry holding a cricket bat.
There are a number of lessons to this story, I think (for instance, teenagers aren’t always as wise as they think and parents are nearly always wiser than their teenagers give them credit for) but one important learning for me is to never rule any career pathway out. The great irony, of course, is that I ended up in a job where I was paid to immerse myself in poetry, cricket and theatre – to a captive audience, no less! Teaching gives me meaning and purpose in a way that my teenage self could never have imagined, but I think I had to work that out for myself.
One wonderful thing about SPSC’s curriculum is how it offers aspirational young men an opportunity to curate focused pathways to tertiary and career destinations that are difficult to access elsewhere. My advice, however, would be to balance that aspirational focus with a reassurance that career pathways need not turn out exactly as you expect, and that there are many ways to connect your passions to purpose.
Mr Nick Carter
Deputy Headmaster – Learning and Teaching
