Many young Australians have been forced to move home while they wait for university campuses to reopen and employers to rehire. UNSW Alumni Logan Birchall has moved home to Mudgee in Central West NSW to ride out #COVID-19 and work out what to do next.

Transcript

Alex Siegers: Logan Birchall is a familiar face around the Music Performance Unit. He has recently completed his Bachelor of Music degree but with the current campus closures we won’t get to see him before his graduation ceremony, so I thought we should give him a call and see how he’s doing in Mudgee.

Logan Birchall: So I started at UNSW in 2015 and slowly doing different things, doing some Engineering, but ending up finishing at the end of last year with a Bachelor of Music degree. And I’ve been working with the MPU for the past 4 years and I’ve just been loving it – such great people to work with and so much fun at the uni.

LB: So I originally came from Mudgee, a small country town in NSW. And then I went to boarding school because there was no music in Mudgee, so I worked hard, got a music scholarship to boarding school for the rest of my high school, and then straight after high school came straight into uni doing more music, so happy as a pig in mud.

LB: And now I’m thinking of, now I’m working as a music teacher, despite the quarantine. And I’m loving the teaching so much, so I’m definitely debating coming back and doing a Masters of Teaching, and then going more into the education route.

LB: And as a music teacher, no one wants more contact with you know, a lot of the schools, while the school is still in place, having us external contract teachers coming in, they’re still not having that cause obviously not wanting to spread the disease and such, so it’s sort of hard for us to then find more work, or, you know, some how, I’ve still got rent to pay, and you know, all sorts of bills to cover even though there’s no jobs and no work out there for us. So that’s making it tough and everyone’s going through that whether they’re just a graduate or not. But having the degree and having something to keep you going and working towards in the degree and then now that’s ended, and what do I do now. So looking for different pathways and stuff would be a major help from the uni.

LB: I think that’s one of the things I’ve taken away from UNSW is just the connections and the people that are there are fantastic and that includes like the MPU and the staff and the lecturers. Like so many of the lecturers are – they can just take a piece of my heart they’re wonderful. And the students are also great. Couldn’t be better.