Consulate General of India and StudyNSW are hosting an information session on 25th August (Friday) from 4pm to 5.30pm for Indian students in NSW about how to remain safe and know your working rights while studying in NSW. The session will be hosted at Indian Consulate’s Sydney office i.e. L2, 265 Castlereagh St Sydney.
The Consul General of India will officially welcome students with guest presentations by StudyNSw, NSW Police, Fair Work Ombudsman, Redfern Legal Centre and Surf Life Saving NSW. All in all this will be very informative session packed with information from variety of sectors where students face difficulties immediately after migrating to Australia.
Gurnam Singh from StudyNSW spoke to SBS Punjabi and shared his own experiences from the times when he arrived in Sydney from India as a student. Though Gurnam himself didn’t face any difficulties in finding his first job but agreed that most of new comers find it very hard to get their first job as they don’t have any ‘local’ reference required for most of the jobs. But Gurnam provided a wonderful suggestion that in Australia, there is a wonderful concept of doing volunteer work in many charity organisations or in their own Universities that in turn become their local reference and help heaps in getting first job.
Gurnam also shared that there is a common phobia in all Indians (let alone students) about Police i.e. to stay away from Police even if they get into a problem. But the police in Australia is very friendly and can be very helpful if you are honest, hardworking and don’t break the law. Another key suggestion made by Gurnam is that students must have or should develop excellent English skills as this is required in all walks of life in Australia.
From his own experience, Gurnam stressed that a solid balance between studies and work must be made. The students who come here have the foremost duty of completing their studies in time and to do fair amount of work in order to earn enough for living and paying their own fees. If they just focus on doing work and ignore studies, the end result is that they have to appear in some subjects again i.e. they have to pay the fees all over again which means their hard-earned savings would be wasted.
