Teaching: the perfect path for high achievers
Dean, Faculty of Education Professor John Loughran
For Monash graduate Susan Wade, it was the desire to make a difference that set her on the path towards teaching. But if that desire hadn’t nagged at her so intently, her move into education may never have happened.
Like many high-achieving secondary school students, Susan was told by mentors and confidants to ignore her natural interest in teaching and “make the most” of her excellent Year 12 results. She took this advice and chose to pursue a commerce degree, but quickly realised that it was a bad decision. However, her move into teaching didn’t happen straight away.
In a recent speech to students at an event hosted by the Faculty of Education, Ms Wade talked of her “two embarrassingly similar detours”. The first was the commerce degree, which she abandoned for a more arts-focused undergraduate course. The second, some years later, was the decision to apply for a graduate job as a management consultant at an accounting firm.
“It was easy to get caught up in the hype of the whole recruitment process. I was made to feel very important,” she told her audience, all of them students who have chosen to study teacher education at Monash after receiving ATAR scores of 90 or above.
“I did learn a lot from my year in that job, but that same old feeling I had had when I studied commerce started to creep back in – this just wasn’t me. The job just didn’t match the hype. I found a lot of the work boring, the pace slow and I was frustrated by the lack of autonomy I had.”
Ms Wade says that she did a lot of soul-searching and when she asked herself what was really important, the answer hit her.
“I kept coming back to the idea of making a difference. At the end of the day, when I go home, I want to know that what I invested my time in will matter to someone, will make the world a better place in some small way. And so, I finally made up my mind to do what I had always wanted to do and that was to teach. “
She resigned from the high-profile job at the accounting firm and began an education course at Monash. Since then Susan Wade hasn’t looked back. She said of her first experience of full-time teaching that it offered much more than the role in the corporate sector ever could.
Faculty of Education Dean, Professor John Loughran told the gathering it was imperative that high achieving students continued to choose education as their first preference.
“It is so important for the teaching profession to be able to attract students of your calibre who are prepared to devote such time and energy in working to improve the education of others. It is not an easy, but it is exceptionally rewarding.”
This is a statement that Ms Wade can verify. Her decision to pursue teaching has taken her overseas and today, having already completed a Master of Education at the University, she is back at Monash completing a PhD on the subject of gifted children with Asperger’s syndrome.
“I was lucky to get a job in a great school and pleased to find that teaching was all I had hoped - plus a bit more sometimes. My job was complex and interesting. In management speak, I was responsible for the work plans and evaluations of over 200 people. I was challenged, had the same responsibility as someone who had been doing the job for years, the autonomy to manage how I worked, and most of all the feeling that what I was doing was making a difference.”