Castlemaine Secondary College students Pip Kelly-Buttfield and Aleka Adam have attended NYSF in 2024 and 2025 respectively.
At a Rotary meeting, Pip explained the stringent selection process and was clearly enthused at his experiences with participating organisations. An experience Pip will long remember was seeing fertiliser created from waste food using maggots, but a presentation by CERN was memorable for all the right reasons!
Ultimately, attending the NYSF program influenced Pip to change his preferred direction from palaeontology to aerospace engineering.
He had amazing experiences, made friends and connections, and fabulous memories to look back on. He is grateful for this life-changing experience and the contributions of Rotarians both as sponsors, providers and volunteers who made it all happen.
“I saw the link to apply for the forum sent out by my science teacher and thought it was impossible,” Aleka said, “but eventually I applied, and it was an amazing feeling to be accepted."
Aleka was particularly impressed by a CSRIO session and while the main outcome for her is that “I just want to do science,” her current top two interests being astrophysics and immunology.
“It wasn’t just science; it was an opportunity to make friends and grow socially," said Aleka. "It was great to be around people who love STEM, and we’re still talking.”