My work experience at Gateshead College

Hi I'm Shelby Dobson, I’m a student, I’m on a course called Project Choice.

I am here to talk about my work experience. I helped out with different courses, I helped out with IT with setting PCs up, I put posters up, they were about not being mean to people and that you are not alone.

I loved helping out at the conference. The days leading up to the conference, I helped blow up balloons, setting up tables and cut little pieces of paper for the events that were on in the classrooms.

On the day I helped with carrying teas and coffees to staff, told staff where the classrooms were for the events, at the end of everything I popped the balloons and cleaned the tables and put the rubbish in the bin.

I helped out with the enrolment day, helping new students go to classrooms to enrol.

I loved helping out with IT and the conference, I disliked shredding paper. I learned how to set up computers and work with new people. I would like to learn more about computers.

I would arrive at college at 8:30 and leave at 17:00 or 17:30. Everyone would say that I did a good and amazing job, they were proud of what I achieved.

After I had finished and was still working I would feel proud of myself about what I've accomplished. I felt interested in my work and how I should learn new things. I really loved working with other people because I felt like a part of something. If any students came up to me and were thinking about doing work experience, the one thing I would say is you should take the offer because you might not get another chance like it. You may not like it at the start, but you will love it, you will learn new things, it will help you to work with people and it will help in the next step to getting a good job.

Martin Herron, Service Desk Manager at Gateshead College said: “Shelby helped our IT department over the summer with a refresh of hundreds of PCs across most classrooms and staffrooms at our biggest campus. She took on a wide variety of tasks with no hesitation, both physical (e.g. cabling and re-cabling classrooms, removing old equipment and taking it to the WEEE disposal area, installing new equipment, logging PCs for disposal), and technical (wiping old PCs with a clean Windows 10 image, setting Wake-on-LAN settings in BIOS, and helping to put new PCs onto our network), and demonstrated a strong work ethic when working alongside me and other members of the team.

"She was always keen to get as much done as possible before the day was over, whether the work involved physically disconnecting and moving dozens of pieces of old equipment, disposing of them and taking accurate logs of the asset tags, installing fresh versions of Windows onto old PCs in preparation to be gifted to charities, or setting up new PCs, making sure all connections were completed and the desks were left tidy. I introduced her to several relatively technical processes which needed to be done to each old PC before removal and to each new PC as they were installed, and she was confident and accurate in completing these tasks without needing to be shown more than once.

"I was extremely impressed with Shelby’s attitude and really hope she is given an opportunity to shine in whichever field she decides she would like to work in – she demonstrated a confidence in putting forward good ideas and suggestions regarding the tasks we worked on which I would never have expected in someone so young, and has the kind of positive attitude towards completing tasks that I am certain is like gold dust to most employers.”