For most people, finding a purpose in life doesn’t come overnight. Many career and study success stories are built on the back of revision, reassessment and self-reflection.
You may feel pressure – from family, friends and society at large – to find a purpose and stick with it. But the journey towards a meaningful career isn’t always that straightforward – as these Griffith University students and graduates can attest.
Jessica Arachchi
Jessica Arachchi always dreamed of becoming a force for good, a vision rooted in her childhood experiences. Through her work as a motherhood and family therapist she now helps parents who want to understand their children deeply.
Jessica Arachchi
“I remember saying to my parents from age 13 or 14 that I was going to be a social worker,” Arachchi says. “I wanted to help children and help parents, because I couldn’t help my parents … there was a lot of distress and unpredictability and uncertainty and trauma in my home.”
But while her childhood ambition was clear, the specifics of how it would manifest in her career took time to unfold. Arachchi worked her way through multiple jobs in health, foster care and children’s yoga, each role offering new perspectives and shaping her understanding of how she could help others. Ultimately, these varied experiences helped her to identify her purpose as a therapist.
Arachchi’s time studying social work at Griffith University was another pivotal step in her journey. “My social work degree helped me understand myself and my parents, and it really led me to a place of compassion,” she says.
Today, she draws on this in her therapy practice to help parents and children navigate their challenges.
For people who are still searching for a purposeful career, it’s worth remembering that a vocation doesn’t always appear immediately. Arachchi offers a reassuring perspective: “I actually encourage the time-taking and the experimentation. I think it’s a glorious thing.”
Ella Toomey
Ella Toomey
Ella Toomey had a long-held dream to be a lawyer. However, when she just missed out on the ATAR she needed to study law, she found herself a little lost.
Toomey had stints studying humanities, architecture and secondary education before taking a break from study. She realised something was missing. “I was just dancing around trying to find something,” she says.
While Toomey took time off from studying, she worked as a technical specialist at an Apple store. It was there that an encounter with an elderly man struggling to operate his device sparked her career purpose.
“It took me sitting down with him for about half an hour and just having a bit of a chat to realise that we just needed to change one setting in his device,” Toomey says. “And he looked at me and he said: ‘You have no idea how much you just made my life easier.’
“It made me feel like I had actually made a genuine difference, and that something I had done had had a positive impact on someone else, and that that would be lasting. And that meant everything to me.”
Fuelled by a new sense of purpose, Toomey enrolled in a double degree in business and design at Griffith University, which allowed her to pursue her interest in accessible technology.
“I realised how people use these devices and how imperative it is in people’s day-to-day lives. Not being like, ‘Oh, I need it for Instagram’, but ‘I need it for my diabetes sensor, I need it for my pacemaker’.”
Taking the time to discover a greater purpose enabled Toomey to make more intentional study and career decisions. “By having that purpose behind me constantly, I could eliminate things that weren’t relevant to what I want to do, which made it a lot easier for me to make these decisions,” she says.
Rebekah Rose-Mundy
Rebekah Rose-Mundy
For Rebekah Rose-Mundy, life has had its challenges. “Growing up, I went to a deaf school until I was about seven, then the school closed and I was transferred to a general mainstream school and I struggled,” she says. “There were a lot of barriers to my education.”
The struggles that Rose-Mundy faced in her education meant she left school without developing her potential. But after school, she met deaf teachers at TAFE who filled her with optimism about her education, and she eventually moved on to work at a deaf school – where she finally found her purpose.
“I decided I wanted to work with deaf children,” she says. “I didn’t want any of those children to have the negative experience that I had undergone.”
Now, later in life, with four grown-up children, Rose-Mundy has resumed her education – this time full of purpose. She’s halfway through a Bachelor of Education at Griffith, a university that prioritises accessible education.
“It’s been the best educational experience that I’ve ever received in my entire life,” says Rose-Mundy, praising the quality of interpreting provisions within the university, the regular meetings, and “the amazing team and deaf support team specialist, […] we have pre lecture videos, and it’s the first time in my life I have been able to watch a lecture and paint my fingernails at the same time. It’s amazing.”
Driven by a goal of creating inclusive education for deaf children, Rose-Mundy has used her time at Griffith to expand her knowledge of what’s required to make education truly accessible.
“The cooperation, the advocacy, the work behind the scenes that goes into it, takes the burden off of me having to do all of that and then study,” she says.
