Isaac's experience as an intern at Ministry of Education allowed him to utilise his hard skills in statistics as well as his own lived experience as a Māori. It also provided him with a confidence to apply for career development opportunities.

Transcript

Kia ora, my name is Isaac Morunga. I completed the ARG internship programme. I'm currently a fourth-year student at the University of Auckland completing a Bachelor of Arts in English and Media Studies and a Bachelor of Science in Statistics. The ARG internship programme offered me the perfect intersection between utilising my hard skills and statistics as well as my own lived experiences as a Māori and my cultural insights of Tikanga Māori and my passion to serve in the education and governmental space.

My primary project involved creating a framework for collecting data and Māori learners in different ā-rohe or regions across New Zealand. My second project was collecting various iwi education plans that iwi had curated and kind of analyzing those so collecting them, deconstructing them, pulling out the different aspects that were overlapping between all of them and then just kind of putting them into like one repository that the Ministry could access for future reference.

They were of a whole range of workshops that are offered to us throughout our duration in the internship programme so I feel more confident in my ability to I guess apply myself to different opportunities that arise. I would definitely recommend the ARG programme to any student that wants to apply. The ARG internship programme gave me the affirmation that the work I was completing was contributing to a better more equitable Aotearoa New Zealand.