Life after Radford with Hamish Podger (Class of 1995)

This week the Radford College teaching team were fortunate to have Hamish Podger (class of 1995) take them through the functionalities of Microsoft Teams due to the increased demands for online learning. If you do not know what Microsoft Teams is, it is a unified communication and collaboration platform that combines workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration.

In light of the current circumstances, the move to online has not been more important than it is at the moment, not just for our teachers and students but for organisations globally.

Hamish shared that Microsoft globally reported a 40% increase Microsoft Teams usage over the last few weeks due to the global pandemic caused by the Coronavirus. This information was shared Microsoft Chief Executive Officer, Satya Nadella who Hamish says is a person that is continuously on a mission to help people and is the person that inspires him the most, he added that Microsoft’s Chief Financial Officer, Amy Hood is formidable in her role and is one of the most passionate speakers.

Hamish said that it was not easy to decide what he wanted to do when he completed his final year of study at Radford. Hamish attended University but found the first-year difficult navigating from what was a structured environment at Radford to a “it’s your choice whether or not you do the work” environment. His advice to current students is: The world changes so rapidly (such as what we are experiencing now), don’t think that Year 12 is your year to have your whole life sorted out – it isn’t. You need to have an open mindset, be flexible and passionate about your choices.

Hamish shared that he wasn’t the kid that liked going to school but developed great friendships with the Facilities and Radford teaching staff – he shared a story about Mr Willets. Hamish recalls when he was in Year 7, Mr Willets (French and German teacher) would say to disruptive students “half a page” which was his punishment to the students, the next student that was disruptive would be told “one page”, then the next, “one and a half pages” and so on and so on until the students finally got the message that they would be completing a number of pages on a topic that Mr Willet decided on should their behaviour not improve. Hamish was so surprised to see that Mr Willet’s had actually filed all those “disruptive” written essays and returned them to the students on their final days at Radford in Year 12.  “The fact that Mr Willets kept those essays was extraordinary”, said Hamish.

Hamish said that he remains in contact with many of his Radford friends, naming just a few Matthew Potter, Elizabeth White and Gajanan Ravichandra (all class of 1995).

Pictured is Hamish and I having our chat for this news article – you can see that Hamish is in the Oval Office which is just one of the many cool features of Microsoft Teams that will be available soon. Other features of Microsoft Teams is being able to blur the background when you are conducting face to face meetings and that the platform Hamish added  can be used on any device making our communication and connection with others just that little bit easier whilst we are all in isolation.

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