Year 13 students, Ella Harrison, Nieve Harrison and Mariana Garcia, have been selected for the AUT Shadow a Leader programme this year.  Ella has written about her experience below.

For the Shadow a Leader programme run by AUT Business School, I was placed with AcademyEX, a company that provides “innovative learning programmes that build relevant skills and capabilities to match the requirements of our constantly changing world”.  I spent the morning with Hayley (the Academic Director) and Maheshi (Community Impact Leader) learning about the back story of AcademyEX and community engagement.  Then in the afternoon, I had the privilege to meet and talk with Frances Valintine (the founder of AcademyEX). Afterwards, I was lucky enough to attend the Sport NZ event with Frances at Aotea Centre where she spoke about ‘Sports meet AI’, from which I learnt a lot about Generative AI. 

Overall, what I gained from this experience is not only knowledge that will help me with my studies next year, but also advice that I can take into the future.  This was such an awesome experience that I would highly recommend it to others.