What happens when learning doesn’t stop at the classroom door?

At Albany Senior High School, academic learning and real-world experience aren’t two separate things. Through Impact Projects, Gateway, leadership opportunities and authentic partnerships, students have the chance to apply what they’re learning, explore where their interests might take them and develop skills they’ll use long after leaving school.

For our alumni, those experiences have led in very different directions.

Discovering a future through experience

For Coco King, one Impact Project helped turn an interest into a career.

While at ASHS, Coco spent time coaching Special Olympics athletes – an experience that taught her about relationships, encouragement and the impact a great teacher can have. “It taught me how to build strong, supportive relationships and showed me the power of encouragement. That’s when I realized I loved teaching and wanted to pursue it as a career.”

Today, Coco is a secondary school English teacher, giving her own students the same encouragement and belief that helped shape her journey.

Applying learning to real problems

For Vienna Brooks, ASHS gave her opportunities to take an existing interest in engineering and explore what it could look like beyond school.

Impact Projects encouraged her to be curious, solve problems and apply her learning in practical ways – an approach that has continued throughout her engineering journey.

Since leaving ASHS, Vienna has studied Mechatronics Engineering, competed at the VEX Robotics World Championship in the United States, presented science shows with Nanogirl Labs and completed an internship at Fisher & Paykel Healthcare. “Impact Projects were at the core of what ASHS was about. They promoted curiosity and the ability to apply learning to real-world problems.”

Skills that travel beyond school

Christopher Fordyce has taken the Impact Project mindset even further.

At ASHS, his projects ranged from designing a specialised mat aimed at reducing the spread of kauri dieback disease to organising and co-hosting a game show.

The outcomes were different, but the skills behind them – leadership, teamwork, communication, project management and perseverance – stayed with him.

Years later, when Christopher was completing his bachelor’s degree, he deliberately framed his university capstone as an “Impact Project”, drawing on the same approach to learning he first developed at ASHS.

And the influence didn’t stop there – lessons from that undergraduate capstone went on to inform Christopher’s approach to his Master’s dissertation, where the soft skills and resilience developed through Impact Projects continued to build on one another. He ultimately received an A- for his dissertation – demonstrating the cumulative impact those early experiences had on his approach to higher-level academic research.

His journey is a reminder that real-world learning isn’t simply about preparing students for one particular career. It’s about developing ways of thinking and working that can transfer wherever they go next.

Learning by doing

For Zach Kirby, that meant getting experience in both entrepreneurship and the workplace.

Through the Young Enterprise Scheme, Zach led his own business, developing biodegradable surf wax through Kiwa Surf Solutions. Gateway also helped him secure part-time employment, where he developed practical skills in technology, sales, leadership and training others.

Meanwhile, Impact Projects challenged him to take ownership of his learning and think differently: “ASHS taught me to ask ‘why’ – to think critically about everything.”

Those skills followed Zach through university and into his professional journey across law and technology.

 

Coco, Vienna, Christopher and Zach have taken very different paths. But their experiences share something important.

At ASHS, academic success doesn’t have to happen in isolation from the world beyond school. Students can study deeply and test ideas, solve problems, work with others, discover new interests and see where their learning could take them.

ASHS is where academics meets the real world – because some of the most powerful learning happens when you get the chance to use it.

Enrolments for 2027 are now open – discover what ASHS could look like for you at ashs.school.nz/enrol.