By CASEY NEILL
MATTY Deane gets paid to holiday around the world.
It’s a dream job, but he’s walked a hard road to get there.
Matty, Alex Woller, Elliott Altmann and Alek Nyok shared their stories with Year 9 and 10 students from the south-east at the annual Lunch with the Winners.
Matty wasn’t academic and “never turned up” to school so had few option after VCE.
He liked the idea of personal training but friends told him there was no money in the career path.
After deciding on teaching – purely for the holidays – he developed a cough.
Doctors diagnosed him with cancer at age 24.
With eight months of chemotherapy and two months of radiation ahead of him, Matty moved home with his mum.
He listened to people complain about their days, didn’t see his friends, could feel himself getting weaker and depression started to set in.
“They were filling my head with negativity,” he said.
“I hadn’t realised how powerful negativity could be.”
A nasty reality check on the scales prompted him to act. He moved out to escape, wrote a bucket list and pursued personal training.
“There’s plenty of money in it if you’re great at it,” he said.
His burning passion was to travel the world, so he found a way to make money from it.
“I work until I’m tired and I travel until I’m bored,” he said.
“That’s my philosophy.”
Alex Woller, 20, won last year’s Chisholm Apprentice of the Year and Greater Dandenong Chamber of Commerce Youth Enterprise Award.
He said a passion for his job and a strong work ethic were the keys to his success.
“I just do what I enjoy,” he said.
Elliott Altmann, 23, moved to Melbourne from country Victoria to study robotics and mechatronics.
“I chose robotics because it was a bit of everything,” he said.
His uncle and the day’s MC James Sturgess said Elliott wasn’t a model student.
“It just shows that you can change your attitude,” James said.
Elliott also served as an example of using personal networks to find a job.
He was too busy designing and building a race car – which earned him a PACCAR Award for his design efforts – to apply for work.
His brother recommended him for a graduate engineer job with a civil construction company.
Alek Nyok, 23, came to Australia from North Sudan at age 10 with her older brother and his wife and two children.
“For me it was almost like going into space,” she said.
She settled in Ringwood and was the first Sudanese student at her school.
“They didn’t know what to do with me,” she said.
A move to Castlemaine for her brother’s job sent her back to square one, but she did find a love for fashion and travelled to Melbourne twice a week to develop her sewing skills.
Alek returned to Sudan to visit her mum and other family at age 20 and returned with a different perspective about the value of fashion design.
She changed paths and is now in her third year of an accounting degree.
Read the related article on this event: Ideas at work
