August 17, 2023

Rector’s eNews – 16 August 2023

/ Newsletters

Last week was an exceptionally busy one at Michaelhouse with many visitors on campus, significant opportunities for our boys in all sorts of ways and preparations for the Matric Ball taking place.

We are grateful to Mr Tim Jarvis, our school counsellor and Senior Master: Pastoral who arranged a World of Work Conference with Mrs Leigh Kotze, HoD of Life Orientation. It was held in the Makan Centre which was buzzing with B Block boys and speakers for this inaugural event at Michaelhouse. Michaelhouse hosted 20 guest speakers both in person and online, highlighting diverse careers from being a chef to engineering. The boys attended a keynote speech at both the start and the end of the day, and in between chose three workshops (from over 15 options) to attend depending on their personal and career interests. A huge thanks to our Old Boys’ network who really stepped up to provide a broad speaker base each with extensive depth of knowledge in their field.

The feedback from both students and speakers was extremely positive. The boys were asked to complete a reflective task after attending each presentation as well as a key take-away point. What was interesting was that even though the speakers were so diverse in career paths, there were common threads woven into each talk. The boys were astonished to learn that they were not just listening to advice about a particular career industry but more importantly a way of living within their chosen career. The key words that were repeated at each presentation were passion, purpose, perseverance, networking, adaptability and failure.

The word passion was repeated in almost every takeaway point in their reflected tasks. This was a very valuable lesson for the boys as so often they consider careers that they think they should be doing and have not yet taken the time to reflect on where their dreams and strengths lie. Strangely, the word failure was almost as often repeated. In most interactions speakers spoke about failure being a positive. Failure is something to learn from and all successful people have experienced failure at some point in their lives but learn how to deal with it going forward. The day closed with careers specialist Mr Bryce Dekker sharing: The 5 mistakes learners make in choosing degrees.


Then the Matric Ball took place on Saturday night amidst great splendour. The boys arrived and walked up the red carpet, lit on both sides towards the venue where the theme was Men of Michaelhouse. We thank Mrs Ilne Visagie and Ms Marcel Cornelius who made the arrangements for this event along with a number of mothers of matric boys led by Mrs Georgie Ridl. We (and the boys) are very grateful to them for their hours of preparation which led to a most enjoyable evening.

The new padel courts are complete and will be open to the boys from the end of next week. They are not open to others just yet. We are going to put a booking app in place, but this will only be up and running at the end of term.

Next week Tuesday (22 August) we are having a Demo Day where we will have three popular brands showcase their equipment. The boys will be able to test out a variety of padel racquets and have the opportunity to buy them at reduced prices (30% off) on the day. Boys will not be able to charge this to their school accounts but will be able to buy on a card directly from the company.

Boys are welcome to buy racquets over the half term and bring them back to school, but we will have professionals giving advice as to what to look for at the demo day, so it is recommended they make use of this.

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