Mai Abdelmawgoud wants to save lives.
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However, an under-resourced system almost quashed her dream of pursuing a pathway that would give her an opportunity to do so.
Through her own determination and grit in her final year of secondary school, she has scraped through to receive an offer to study medicine this year at a university six hours from Sydney and two flights away from where her Egyptian-born family lives in Shepparton.
With more support for her English studies, she might not have had to sweat the result. And she may have received an offer closer to home.
“I was just not getting the best support as a second (English) language speaker, and that showed in my results,” Mai said.
“(Out of all my results) my English study score was the lowest and I was one study score off not getting into my dream course, so it was very scary.”
The 18-year-old Goulburn Valley Grammar School graduate wrote about her struggle in a powerful entry to ABC’s Heywire lived experience storytelling competition.
Heywire invites young people aged 16 to 22 years in regional, rural and remote Australia to tell true stories about an aspect of their lives in text, video or audio format.
Mai’s story, first penned when she was in Year 10, was one of just 38 winners in this year’s competition.
In it, she wrote: I can explain how the heart and lungs work together in perfect sync or break down the complexities of calculus as easily as pi.
But hand me a Year 12 English essay prompt on Oedipus the King and I’m lost.
Reading Mai’s words and listening to her speak, seemingly far ahead of her years, you would never guess the language was a barrier.
However, she only began learning English six years ago, six months before her family moved to Australia from Saudi Arabia, where had she spent most of her life.
She explained the struggle with English did not lie in her speech.
“I definitely listened to a lot of YouTube before moving, so a lot of the speech is there, and most people can pick up an American accent in my speaking because of the YouTube that I was watching,” she said of the platform she watched purposely to learn.
“I was watching my mother practising for her IELTS (International English Language Testing System) exam so she could get entry to Australia and I thought, you know what, I’m going to try to do better than Mum.
“It took a year or so after I moved to be able to speak fluent English; I was still in Year 7.”
She said she was still learning, and found context confusing at times.
“To this day, people still say slang words or words that I’ve never heard before, so I have to ask what exactly they mean by that,” Mai said.
As a winner, Mai will head to Canberra in the coming weeks on an all-expenses-paid five-day summit where she might get a chance to meet Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
“We’ll go to Parliament House a couple of times, to lots of workshops, I’m very excited, I’ve never been as excited about anything because it’s time for me to take a break from the educational system for a bit,” Mai said.
“I was really, really stressed in Year 11 and Year 12 and I’m about to go to uni for a very hard course as well, so I think it’s good for a change to have a week before I jump into anything.”
During the summit, besides the sightseeing and rubbing shoulders with pollies, the young winners will have a chance to share ideas that will help youth in regional areas.
Mai’s focus is close to her heart.
She will suggest getting support in regional areas for people like her, for whom English is their second language.
“It’s not just Arabs who are struggling with this,” Mai said.
“I have so many friends in other schools here in Shepp who speak the same level of English or less than me; why aren’t they getting the help they need?
“They want to do big things. They want to be engineers, they want to be doctors and English is what’s stopping them.”
Mai said her school didn’t have a teacher to facilitate ESL (English as a second language) classes, so if she wanted to study it, she had to do it online without any real-life support.
“The other choice was you just do English and you just deal with it,” she said.
“I got support from my teachers, but it’s not their fault they don’t know how to deal with a second-language speaker; they don’t know what sort of resources I need.
“I don’t even know what sort of resources I need. I still don’t know what help I might need, but there’s someone out there who does.”
It’s seemingly a system that’s robbing itself of talented graduates who are passionate and capable of becoming skilled professionals.
For the individuals on the other side, to be held back by language in a land they’ve embraced, love and want to make a difference in, must be a heartbreaking hurdle.
“What if I hadn’t got that 36 and I got a 34?” Mai said.
“That would’ve been it for me.
“I would’ve done so much better if I’d gotten the resources, because it showed in my other subjects.”
Mai said though now she had finished high school and was into her university course of choice, she still wanted to help the next generations with their struggles.
She might just see her younger brother (aged eight) and sister (14) benefit, too.
“Hopefully it just helps other people. That’s what I want. If I didn’t get that chance myself, I want to give it to other people,” she said.
Mai is grateful to have been chosen as a Heywire winner and suggested every eligible young person should have a crack at the competition.
She said you didn’t need to be a good writer; you just needed to be authentic when telling your unique story.
“That’s my style of writing, just writing from my heart, not trying to be complicated, not trying to be Shakespeare,” Mai said.
“Every story is an important story. Whether it gets highly commended, whether it doesn’t get anything, whether you win — it’s an important story that people deserve to know.
“And even if it doesn’t come out to the Australian community, the people at ABC will read it and you’ve made at least one person impacted by your story, if not thousands of people if you win.
“It’s an amazing opportunity, so do it, do it, do it,” Mai chanted enthusiastically.
∎ To read Mai’s full winning entry, visit ABC’s Heywire website.
Senior journalist