Student placement - Sunny

Published on 30 September 2025

Sunny Tandoc, Diploma of Youth Work at RMIT

I was fortunate enough to undertake my 200-hour placement at Monash Youth Services (MYS).

During my placement, I initially supported the facilitation of the Monash Youth Film Festival Planning Committee. During the first set of meetings, I was able to use my skills in filmmaking to help young people create a promotional short film. It was a fun and creative project that allowed me to actively build connections and rapport with young people. I found it rewarding watching participants’ confidence grow and their own creativity flourish each week. I also have helped with local outreach which involved promoting the Monash Film Festival. It was a fun experience where a couple of young people and I walked around the local area in costume handing out flyers. This was a joy to watch the young people have the confidence to walk up to people and talk about an event, they are helping to organise. I also gave additional help with judging the submissions.

Further into my placement, I was able to participate in programs such as Activate and Elevate. At the beginning, I was supporting the facilitation of each program and observed the youth workers on program. As I joined in more sessions, I was able to facilitate ice breakers such as Human Bingo that coincided with the life skill that was being built upon that week. During this time, I began to help plan the main activity for Elevate sessions and continued to support the program. This experience has been really enlightening, and I got to work on many different activities such as:

• Having young people write a speech in a short amount of time then refining it after workshopping it with each other, enables young people to learn life skills and builds their confidence.
• Creating an escape room where young people use their communication and problem-solving skills to solve puzzles.
• Creating shopping lists with ingredients within a budget for young people to cook following a recipe.

I’ve experienced a breadth of opportunities to engage with young people. I have supported cooking sessions during the school holidays, been on school outreach for IDAHOBIT day and created content for online outreach. These experiences have allowed me to observe different programs and methods that MYS offers to young people in the area.

Outside hands-on engagement with young people, I have attended a couple of weekly team staff meetings during my semester break. There are also monthly journal meetings where staff reflect on evidence-based practice. When I attended a team member explored two articles on Understanding Long Term and Youth Homelessness. This has shown me, learning continues outside of formal education and how it important it is to continue to explore   sociological impacts that affect young people.

Overall, I experienced a range of experiences that have supported my educational learnings. Placement at MYS has taught me a lot about myself and my youth work practice. I have built up my own confidence alongside the young people I have been able to engage with. This has been an insightful and fun experience; I loved working with the MYS team.