Teenagers Michelle and Zak went to Slough to take part in sky.com's Reach for the Sky ON TOUR careers roadshow. Find out below what they thought of the day...
| We weren't sure that it really pointed us on a career path. We're still too young to make those decisions. |
How many people have life changing experiences in a leisure centre in Slough? That's what we wanted to find out when we attended the Reach for the Sky Roadshow touring the UK this spring.
We arrived in the huge main hall of the Montem Centre on a bright Thursday in May along with around 100 other teenagers. The atmosphere was very lively and noisy. It was a bit of a strange set-up - the other half of the hall was filled with OAPs at a drop-in centre. The mixture of hip-hop music and elderly ladies having their feet done was bizarre!
The staff greeting us were very helpful and friendly and we were immediately given a written prize quiz to do, which was a good idea for overcoming nerves.
There followed around an hour of warm up games, performed together in a huge group. The acoustics were really poor and it was pretty difficult to hear Tony, the host.
The games would have been more effective if we'd all split up into small groups straight away. The warm-up could also have been much shorter, leaving more much needed time for the rest of the morning's activities.
We were put into groups of around twelve and given twenty-minute tasters of five different activities - journalism, sport, drama, dance and media. It was really too brief to get any sort of a feel for anything.
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| And finally... Zak takes a turn at reading the news |
We started off in the Journalism Zone. Six of us went off to the car park to visit the Sky News truck. It operated like a real TV studio, with cameras, video machines and presenters desks.
We each briefly took on one of the different roles in the studio. It would have been good if there'd been time to try other jobs too. The tutor, a real Sky News journalist, was a bit stern. But we reckon that's not such a bad thing, as that's how people probably are in a real TV newsroom!
We then went onto a squash court (the acoustics were awful!) to find out in ten minutes how to write a story - an impossible task in the time available.
Without time to draw breath, we were ushered into the Sports Zone, for a session with an educational sports therapist. She explained the various careers we could take up in sport, such as athlete, coach or equipment designer, but talked too fast for us to take it all in. We then played a team game, using tennis balls to hit human targets, which was quite good fun.
After a quick break we moved into the Drama Zone. We played various games with two friendly guys in a very informal atmosphere. Having a race standing on chairs and passing imaginary balls round a circle was enjoyable, although it wasn't perhaps what we would have expected from a drama session. Yet again, it was difficult to hear everything as we were being drowned out by the sports instructor right beside us.
The Dance session was good fun. Our two "cool dude" instructors from the Brit School were really clear. They kept repeating the moves so everyone could get to grips with the hip-hop dance.
Media was enjoyable too, with two very friendly leaders. We had to spot slogans from adverts and theme music from TV series. We weren't too sure about why they started pointing the camera at us to show the various effects you could do on the camera. This may have put off people who were shy. We thought this one could have been a more active session, with us having a go on the camera rather than the tutors.
Throughout the morning it was difficult to get a proper feel for anything and we felt a bit too bombarded with information. We weren't too sure about the location. It's difficult to hear anything in a sports hall and there was no natural light. On a warm spring day surely it would have been better to do some of the activities, especially sports, outside.
We thought things could have been a bit better organised. It was a bit chaotic at times, when people didn't know where they should be going or what they were doing. Lunch was a bit of a scrum. If you weren't pushy diving into the boxes filled with sandwiches you could easily miss out.
In the afternoon you chose the zone that interested you most and spent a couple of hours working on a challenge. They ranged from writing and presenting a news bulletin, performing a dance routine, acting out a short play, devising a TV advert, to creating a new sport. We plumped for journalism and dance.
In journalism we were given stories to re-write in small groups, before going on to record a whole news bulletin in the studio. This was really good fun and quite a sense of achievement.
In dance we had more time to spend on the routine. The two instructors showed us a tape of themselves in a pop video, which really gave us something to aim at. They were pretty inspirational really.
Finally everyone came together for the presentations and there was a real sense of team bonding and achievement.
Overall, we thought the day might have been better if it had been a teacher-free zone. Some of the teachers were pushing young people to do things they may not have necessarily wanted to. Better efforts could have been made to get us all mixing. Some arrived in large school groups and it was a bit intimidating for those who didn't know anyone.
Two of the sections were pretty similar, and very TV biased. The journalism section was really media, involving far more than just writing and presenting the news. The media one was more about advertising. We'd have liked to see something on music or radio.
We weren't sure that anything we experienced today really pointed us on a career path. At 14 and 15 we reckon we're still too young to make those sorts of decisions. But it's easy to see how people at sixteen and over could be inspired by it.
Reach For The Sky ON TOUR was a good laugh and pretty informative. Although certain areas of the day could still be improved, we'd still recommend it to anyone.
About the team
This story was produced by Michelle Ijoyah, 15, and Zak Garner-Purkis, 14. It was published on sky.com's Reach for the Sky website.
