Lawrence's experience at the Ministry of Education echoed his passion for education and provided him with multiple training workshops for career development opportunities.

Transcript

Kia ora my name is Lawrence and I've been an intern through the ARG programme at the Ministry of Education. I applied for the internship through the ARG programme because I am passionate about education. I see education as a vehicle to drive broader social change and I wanted to experience this work in the public sector. Throughout my internship I had the opportunity to undertake multiple training workshops. These included report writing, data visualization and system thinking across a broad range of agencies.

My project at the Ministry of Education was to look at between region movement of students and using July school role data and I used a combination of excel and SAS in order to analyse and make better sense of my data before generating a report. I felt immediately at home in my team and I also really enjoyed having the opportunity to meet other people both in passing and through job shadowing opportunities. Some of the highlights for me were meeting associate Minister of Education Jan Tinetti, getting into a Parliament and sitting in on Parliament in session during question time. The ARG internship has definitely affected my career plan. It's shown me a whole lot of ways in which I can apply both my skills and also my passion for working in the public sector and it's also solidified my interest in teaching.