My name is Sila and I am in year 12 at Dane Court Grammar School. My school has given us the opportunity to spend a week doing work experience at places that we either chose ourselves or got allocated based on our interests or hobbies that could potentially help us open our minds to the work force to gain a deeper insight into it all.

I was allocated to Canterbury Festival, which somehow I hadn’t heard of before which comes as a shock to me now after seeing all the popular events they do all over Canterbury. My time here has been a real eye-opener to how organisations like this bring together such admired shows and events as I’ve been working with different departments to see how every detail comes together to build the image of community-helping charities such as Canterbury Festival.

Not only have the staff here helped me gain an insight into how charities like themselves get involved in the community, but they have also given me more confidence and motivation in working in different areas of an organisation by giving me tasks that varied between creating advertisement posts to calling schools over Kent for future opportunities for other students like myself, and they even allowed me to view the difficulty of the financial sector and allowed me to use their online financial systems to gain experience into accounting tasks.

The team here couldn’t have been any more welcoming and optimistic during my time here, and even during their busiest days and times they were always open to telling me more about their roles and what they individually bring into their organisation. Although a week won’t ever be enough for anyone to see the ins and outs of charities or organisations, the staff here have all put in so much effort to provide me with as much experience and knowledge about how they work as a team and I really do think this will all help me for whatever I do in the future.