Techies on board for navy training

By Mara Pattison-Sowden
A LITTLE Yarra Steiner School student has won a scholarship to spend a week with the Australian Defence Force.
Angus Goldman was one of 236 Victorian students to be awarded the scholarship, and the only student in the Yarra Valley.
The Defence Technical Scholarships provide $2000 to year 11 students interested in pursuing a technical career in the ADF when they leave school.
Sixteen-year-old Angus said he thought it was “a pretty good deal” to spend five days at HMAS Cerberus at Crib Point in September.
One of the resident “techie guys” at school, Angus said he was interested in seeing what technology the defence force uses.
“The defence force is always first to get new technology and it would be great to work with some of that,” he said.
Angus has taken a distance education information technology course, a Vocational Education and Training (VET) course in music, lighting, live recording and sound mixing, as well as a programming course run last year in conjunction with Swinburne University.
“I do some programming at home too, calculation programming,” he said.
“I’d like to see if I can get a piece in the Apple world and come up with a big idea (for a new iPhone application).”
Upper school co-ordinator Lisa Branch said Angus had been a great help around the school.
“He does a lot of extra things, which is great for us techno-phobe teachers,” she said.
“As soon as something goes wrong and we can’t troubleshoot, these boys are there to fix the problem.”
The 2011 program received more than 2000 applications and Defence Minister Warren Snowden said it was the only large scale program targeting students specifically wishing to pursue a trade.
“The Defence Technical Scholarship program aims to address the national shortage of technical trade qualified people within the Australian workforce while demonstrating defence’s commitment to compete for its fair share of them,” he said.
The program was originally launched in 2008 but this year is the first to reach the program’s ceiling for scholarships awarded.