Want some tips on how to navigate Year 12 and the HSC? Are you perhaps thinking about joining the Pathfinder program?
Well, you’ve come to the right spot! We sat down with Pathfinder alumni Kayla to discuss her HSC journey, how she balanced school and her commitments and what she is up to now.
If you’re an aspiring vet, this will be particularly insightful for you as Kayla shares details and tips about the application process.
Despite walking away with an incredible ATAR of 97.85, she just missed out on making it into the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine at USYD. However, she is hoping to pursue that in the future and is currently studying Vet Science at USYD.
There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s dive on in!
Biggest Challenges
Kayla’s Pathfinder Mentor and Stepping It Up for Year 12
Study Schedule
Strategies to Help with Motivation
Overcoming the Challenges of English
Balancing Commitments
Kayla’s Experience with Pathfinder Workshops and Intensives
Advice for Students Wishing to Pursue a Doctor of Veterinary Science
Biggest Challenges
The jump from Year 11 to Year 12 proved to be quite a big challenge for Kayla — as it is for many students.
During Year 11, Kayla just did the minimum and that was enough to get her good marks. But, when Year 12 came around, she just kept doing what she had done in Year 11 but soon realised it wasn’t enough.
She also knew something had to change if she wanted to get 97 and above — the ATAR cut-off to study Veterinary Medicine. Especially since it’s a competitive degree to get into as there are limited spots.
Also want to achieve a 95+ ATAR? Check out how our other Pathfinder alumni, Hamish, managed it here!
“I was kind of just got still going with that momentum, just coasting through, but it wasn’t working anymore, so I needed some extra help,” she told us.
That’s why Kayla decided to apply for the Pathfinder Program because she needed someone to hold her accountable and push her as well as someone who could teach her how to work smarter, and not harder.
English was another challenge for her. As someone who did a lot of maths and science subjects, the one subject she had to do — English — was something she struggled with.
“It’s just so open and subjective, and really creative,” she said.
“I’m not naturally a creative person, and so coming up with my own ideas, and my own take on texts that are different to what my teacher said, or what people in class said, was always the biggest challenge for me,” she added.
Kayla’s Pathfinder Mentor and Stepping It Up for Year 12
Steph, who was Kayla’s Pathfinder Mentor, played a big role in Kayla’s HSC journey.
“She was always a constant encouragement, constant support and even outside of our monthly sessions, she would always constantly message me to check up on how I was going… and just doing everything I needed to do,” Kayla said.
When Kayla got a mark she wasn’t happy with, like the time she received a 75 in English, Steph would help her look forward and think about how they could work together to improve that mark.
“She never let me insult myself or put myself down,” Kayla said.
Study Schedule
Steph also helped Kayla by introducing a study schedule into her daily routine — especially since Kayla had a lot going on in Year 12.
Kayla often struggled to stick to a timetable because she would put down everything she had to do in one day which was very overwhelming. It often meant she would just put it off until the next day and then the next and the list just grew bigger and bigger.
“I was so stressed, and it was just unachievable,” Kayla said. Steph taught Kayla to “have breaks, set exact time schedules and set simpler, more achievable goals.”
While it took a few weeks for Kayla to get used to sticking to the schedule, Steph kept her accountable each week which really helped her get used to the new approach.
“After the first two weeks, I would stick to the schedule pretty much every week, and I would achieve most of my goals, and if not, she would help me rearrange it and set up what I did wrong, and how I can make it more achievable next time,” Kayla explained.
So, Steph held Kayla accountable and also provided a constant feedback loop.
This was particularly helpful for Kayla as Trials got closer, especially since she was feeling burnout and sick of studying. Actively ticking off her to-do’s and seeing what she has achieved was motivating!
Strategies to Help with Motivation
Year 12 is a rollercoaster of highs, and lows when it comes to motivation. Sometimes it’s totally there and other times, it’s really, really lacking.
What helped Kayla most was realising that everyone is in the same boat. Like everyone, she experienced times when she was just totally over studying and didn’t want to do it anymore.
As she did her HSC throughout the pandemic, it was even more challenging because she was alone and wouldn’t see people all day. So, Kayla reached out to friends who were feeling the exact same way she was!
“We’d set up study dates — via FaceTime and we’d all study together to motivate each other,” she said.
“I would also reach out to the other members of the Pathfinder Program, and they were another sense of support that I got from this program, and we’d all motivate each other to just to keep going that one more day, that one more month, just to get it to the end,” Kayla added.
It was in Year 12 that Kayla reached out to her support network, which she hadn’t done in Year 11 and that’s what got her through those challenging times.
“You can see everyone start to come together as a community and realise we’re all in the same boat. We need to help each other out here,” she said.
Having a strong support network that you can lean on is key!
Overcoming the Challenges of English
Mastering essay writing started out as a painful experience for Kayla. She struggled with structuring essays and wasn’t linking her answers back to the question.
“It was really frustrating to know that I had kind of put in the effort to write an entire essay and get the feedback that I never answered the question. It wasn’t what they wanted,” Kayla told us.
She was putting in all the work but not getting the results and that was something she had to come to terms with.
Her mentor Steph was able to help her with this and guide her along the way to get the results she wanted. “She showed me what I needed to do and how I needed to do it,” she said.
So, that meant incorporating her thesis into every topic sentence, linking back to the question and not just writing what immediately came to her mind, but having a think about what exactly she was trying to answer before putting pen to paper.
Instead of focussing on why she had to do English and her frustration with the subject, Kayla realised at one point, she had to change her relationship with the subject.
“I came to the realisation, that’s not a good mindset — I need to do English, I can’t drop it. So, I sort of started working harder, and I started figuring out what I did wrong,” she explained.
A great technique Kayla implemented was redoing all her assessments.
“Every time I got a bad mark, or something I wasn’t happy with, I’d redo it and resubmit it until I got a mark that I was happy with, and got a lot of feedback,” she said.
This really helped her improve to the point where she got up to a 90 in her second last internal assessment!
While she fell back to the 70s in Trials and was very disheartened, Steph helped her realise:
“One mark didn’t really define me as a person or didn’t define my whole English journey and didn’t really negate any of the work that I’ve done previously. It just meant I had more motivation to work harder to improve and to get higher and higher in the HSC.”
How Kayla Went with English in the HSC
Despite wanting to drop it and struggling with the subject, Kayla walked away with an 87 for English! So, all the hard work she did and the pain she pushed through really did pay off.
And the secret? Not giving up!
“I wanted to give up a few times, but it was just the support network that really pulled me through and just the motivation of it being only a few months of my life. I can get through it and I’m not going to waste it by wallowing in despair, but I’m just going to do everything I can, and I’m going to improve my marks and get the highest I can,” she explained.
Tying in Her Dreams of Making an Impact with School
Since a young age, Kayla has always wanted to protect animals and their habitats. But she struggled to tie that into her Year 11 and Year 12 journey.
It can be hard to connect such big dreams with the HSC and see the point of it all. Especially when it came to English (her least favourite subject).
Steph worked with Kayla on her goals and tried to find a connection to make sense of it all.
Kayla had always been on the SRC and was also School Captain which meant she had a lot to balance in her final school year. But Steph helped her set it all out, so she had a clear plan to follow.
“So, using the SMART technique, making the goals achievable, and making them not too big ideas, like saving the environment, but just smaller things like getting girls at school to pick up rubbish in the schoolyard,” Kayla explained.
Steph also helped Kayla tie in her goal of saving the environment with what she was doing in English. “It kind of motivated me to actually want to do English,” she said.
Now, this wasn’t the case for Great Expectations but for the creative writing piece, Kayla actually wrote about bushfires.
“I wrote about the impact of bushfires on the environment, and I aimed to generate empathy towards the environment and how important it is in our daily lives,” she said.
“That was a way that it made me more passionate about doing English because it’s something I also believed in,” she added.
Balancing Commitments
Kayla was a very, very busy HSC student — netball on the weekends, school captain responsibilities, running the environmental committee and doing 6 subjects (12 units). It doesn’t leave a lot of leftover time!
So, how did she manage it all?
It came down to breaking everything down into smaller chunks.
If she had to write an essay one week, that meant breaking it down into smaller steps: writing the introduction, finding quotes, finding techniques, writing the paragraph, etc. That was how Kayla approached all the tasks she had to do.
“While that seems redundant, it was really helpful, because it helped me tick it off, get the motivation to keep going to the next one,” she said.
It was hard for Kayla to manage her health goals because she had so much to do and not a lot of spare time.
But once again, she sat down with Steph and together they set small goals for each day, whether it was going for a walk or getting a certain number of steps.
Advice for Students with Lots of Commitments
“If you ever feel overwhelmed, what I did is I just sat down, and I made a list of everything I needed to achieve,” Kayla said.
Whatever it was, whether it was as big as saving the environment or a small thing like doing the dishes, she wrote it all down.
“I had different categories, and I broke each different task into smaller things that I could achieve week by week, and month by month,” she told us.
She used Jamboard and had a different slide for each of her commitments: health, academics and leadership.
Kayla’s Experience with Pathfinder Workshops and Intensives
The goal of these workshops and intensives is to learn how to study smarter and not harder.
For Kayla, the traffic light technique was the most useful strategy she learnt! Kayla put every single syllabus dot point into a Google sheet and then printed it off.
If she was confident with the dot point, then it would be highlighted in green. If she wasn’t so confident, then it would be orange and if she had no idea, then it was red.
“It meant that I wasn’t going back to studying everything all over again. I would start by studying the red areas of things I didn’t know and once I looked at them and made them orange, I’d go back and study all the oranges, and once everything was green, I knew my content, I was just revising,” she explained to us.
“That helped me prioritise, and then make my studying not just about learning everything, but learning the most important things first,” Kayla added.
Her Favourite Pathfinder Intensive
In Kayla’s favourite Pathfinder Intensive, she not only finally got to meet everyone for the first time in person (because of COVID) but she also learned a lot of important life skills.
“I learned how to ace job interviews, write resumes, and also just interact with people and kind of build up my networking skills as well,” she told us.
“It’s something that I didn’t really learn at school, and then it wasn’t taught, but through the Pathfinder program, I’m able to carry those skills with me for the rest of my life,” Kayla said.
Key Take-outs
Kayla didn’t know how to write a resume or how to approach a job interview but after the final Pathfinder Intensive, this was a different story.
“I came out of the Intensive just knowing that I had the practical skills of being able to talk about myself without sounding cocky, that I could kind of recognise my achievements and recognise my value in the workplace,” she said.
In terms of resume writing, she felt much more confident after the intensive because she had learnt a few tricks!
First trick: putting your most impressive experience first. For Kayla, that was her volunteering at Taronga Zoo. Also, everyone knows the name, Taronga Zoo, and sometimes a name drop can also be more helpful than you might think.
Second trick: Looking back at things you have done in the past, which you did just for fun. It might be an activity or experience that is worth mentioning because it makes you stand out or shows important skills.
The Best Part about the Pathfinder Program
For Kayla, it was meeting and working with her mentor, Steph!
“I kind of not only had a mentor but I made a friend as well,” she said.
“The best thing about working with Steph was just her positive attitude and her constant optimism and her cat popping into the video chats as well from time to time,” she added.
What Kayla learnt from the Pathfinder Program
“I think that the Pathfinder program helped me find balance in the way that it helped me kind of categorise different areas of my life and set goals. So I could be more proactive in achieving them and be kind of more present, and knowing what I had to do rather than being overwhelmed and stressed all the time.”
What Kayla wished she did differently?
“I think just getting on to everything as soon as possible and not putting too much pressure on myself to achieve a 90 from the very start and just reminding myself that this is a journey,” she said.
She also said it’s important to remember:
“There are going to be challenges and struggles but you just have to keep going. Just keep going and you’ll make it to the end.”
Advice for Students Wishing to Pursue a Doctor of Veterinary Science
Preparation and starting early is key!
You can’t just decide overnight during Year 12 that you want to apply for it because it’s not just about the ATAR. There is another element to the application process: a veterinary commitment statement.
Now Kayla specifically talked about the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine at USYD.
For their veterinary commitment statement, there is a big checklist for all your different animal handling experiences. This can range from herding cattle to trimming a dog’s nails to having your own pets.
Kayla recommends looking at the checklist early and seeing what you can do — whether it’s volunteering on a farm, which is something she did, or getting work experience at a veterinary clinic or zoo. Whatever it is you decide to do, make sure you start as early as possible — ideally Year 9 or Year 10 if you know it’s really what you want to do.
Kayla had work experience lined up at Taronga Zoo, however, it got cancelled due to the pandemic. Despite this, she still managed to volunteer on a farm for a day and was already volunteering at Taronga Zoo, just not working directly with the animals. But she did learn a lot about the animals and what they do there through that.
Kayla believes her lack of work experience did impact her application, although she got the required ATAR for the degree. Unfortunately, the ATAR alone is not enough, and you have to somehow stand out because there are such limited spots.
“It meant that I didn’t stand out as much as other people who might have had different types of work experience as well,” she told us.
She advises talking to your careers advisor as early as possible to help you organise work experience so you can show on your commitment statement that you’re motivated and serious about wanting to study a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine.
And that’s a wrap!
That was Kayla’s Year 12 journey! We covered everything from overcoming challenges, to learning how to set goals and balance commitments and the benefits of the Pathfinder Program.
We also touched on the application process for Veterinary Medicine. If you’re interested in finding out more about the Pathfinder Program, get in touch!
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Tanna Nankivell is a Senior Content Writer at Art of Smart Education and is currently in Germany completing a year of study for her double degree in Communications (Journalism) and Bachelor of Arts (International Studies). She has had articles published on Central News – the UTS Journalism Lab and wrote a feature piece for Time Out Sydney during her internship. Tanna has a love for travel and the great outdoors, you’ll either find her on the snowfields or in the ocean, teaching aqua aerobics or creating short films.
