Like many school leavers, Hannah Gray wasn’t 100% sure of which avenue to pursue when taking her next step in education. Fortunately, a perfectly timed job offer and her passion for music helped influence her choice, and she’s never looked back.
Finishing high school in Year 13, Hannah was offered a position as a Trainee Accountant with Findex. At that stage, she was already music teaching part-time in violin and piano, and saw the job offer as the perfect opportunity to gain experience in the world of accountancy while staying in Invercargill. “And I didn’t want to give up my music students,” she said.
Having grown up in Southland, Hannah was familiar with SIT; she knew about the Zero Fees Scheme, which was another reason to train in Invercargill, gaining her degree at minimal cost to herself. Embarking on her studies, she juggled them alongside working in accounting and her music teaching.
She described the BCom as building on the base she had covered at high school level. “Everything just built on from there – it was quite broad as well, I got to do law and management papers - it was much broader than what I learnt at school.”
Hannah said her SIT studies have informed her thinking in terms of providing a good understanding of how the business world works, and of law and commerce in general.
“I really enjoyed that we got to choose electives,” she said, and mentioned a paper she particularly relished and got a lot from: “I did a summer paper on Entrepreneurship – I loved it”. As part of the assessment on the paper, Hannah interviewed an entrepreneur, who had the same interests as her and was a music teacher. “It really inspired me to go from part-time to full-time music teaching... It was having the freedom to choose the things that interested me.”
During her degree, Hannah found meeting all of her commitments was demanding. “I was balancing study, work and part-time music teaching as well – I had to be really strict with time management; not wasting evenings and weekends and just getting things done.”
But she did it, completing her degree in three-and-a-half years. “It was really hard at the time... I’m really grateful for it now,” she said. Pushing herself by studying online papers as well, Hannah completed three papers per semester. “It was short-term pain for long-term gain,” she added.
Because of her workload, there wasn’t really time for Hannah to engage in student life. “I was working full-time, and just got time off to go to classes then would return to work,” she explained. “I knew there was plenty available for students, but I didn’t have time to take it up.”
Hannah rates her top experience was the learning she gained with the entrepreneurship tutor. “She had set up her own businesses and it really inspired me, that she had achieved that.” She also enjoyed the smaller class sizes. “They were pretty small and the tutors knew you by name – you could ask for one-on-one help and get it... It was a good experience and I enjoyed my time there.”
Hannah is now self-employed and runs her own business as a music teacher. Finishing her studies in June last year, she quickly realised she wanted to expand her own business, and resigned from her accountants role in September, not wasting any time to get stuck into her new, full-time career. “It was a wee bit of a risk because of Covid, but I thought, I’ll give it a go, if it doesn’t work out, I’ll try something else.”
“The degree gave me the confidence to go out on my own...” she said, “and it does help with the running of the admin side of my business as well,” adding, “you learn some good life skills – communication and time management as well.”
Hannah is still training and practices the Suzuki method of teaching music – also known as the mother-tongue approach, whereby the teacher applies the same principles of language acquisition to the student learning music. Some of the features of the Suzuki method include: listening, imitation and repetition.
“I’m quite happy doing what I’m doing. I can see myself doing this for a long time and developing as a teacher,” she said with a smile.