Kia Ora!
My name is Milla, and I'm a Year 12 student this year, and this summer, I spent a week at Te Rangihiroa with 400 other high school students at a programme called Hands on Otago. In this week, we all lived together, waking up at 6am, and collectively ruined our sleep schedules. Hands on Otago is brilliant in the way that it gives Year 12 and 13 students a chance to experience life as a university student, and provides us with so many chances to make friends from all over our country. During this week, we had a brilliant psychology guest lecturer, had a pitch perfect style riff off, stayed up till midnight dressed like we were from spack, and asked ‘what’s your project?’ too many times to count.

In the week, each student chose a ‘project’ to be a part of (like a class at university), and I was part of the politics group. Over the week, we attended our classes, working on our various projects, and learning from guest lecturers, current PhD students, and meeting department faculty. The politics project was really interesting, as we had to build a completely new world from scratch and see if it functioned with randomly made characters. This, of course, ended up with our group forgetting to add any child labour laws, leading to having a child character in the mines. The politics projects I would definitely recommend to anyone with strong opinions and who likes debating. Thank you so much to Molly and Brock, our lecturers. 

At the end of the week, when we were all exhausted and had met so many people, the week-long fun was celebrated with our ‘big night out’. A dance that was sort of like a primary school disco, but with so much more glitter and scream singing. Everyone dressed up as if they were ‘out of this world’, and every floor group had to perform a dance that they had been choreographing every night at floor meetings. 

Hands On Otago is such a valuable experience for students in Year 12 and 11 in 2026, and would recommend it to anyone who even has a slight interest in it. Hands On gives you such amazing opportunities, but also makes you more familiar with how university life really is. It’s so worthwhile, although tiring, the sleep deprivation is made up by how many experiences you gain.

Thank you so much to OGHS for funding a lot of my time at Hands On, as well as a big thank you to the Red Shirts and students I met at Hands On. Feel free to contact me, if you have any questions about Hands on, Or want more info about the programme.