 Hi, I'm Alison Tair Horse and I'm one of the 2018 Education Careers Ambassadors. This week we're in Mount Isa, visiting Spinefax State College where I used to teach. How did I end up in Mount Isa? I answered a phone call from the department while I was still on my final crack. After I hung up the phone, then I googled where Mount Isa was and went, okay, looks like I'm up for an adventure. The emotion hit me more when I got on the plane in Brisbane, knowing that I was leaving absolutely everybody I knew behind, and then watching the landscape through the window changing from, you know, there's water, there's a beach, it's green, it's slowly getting browner and browner and drier and drier, and then landing at the airport and just seeing red and dust, what have I done? But I was always surrounded by somebody who could tell from the look on my face what was going on. In a really short amount of time, I wasn't missing anyone, I was too busy, there's too many people and too many things to do and too many rivers to be floating down and camels to be looking at, to be missing anybody at home. Going back to Spinefax and seeing my own classroom and particularly seeing Frances, a student that was in my very, very first class, seeing her now as a teacher with her own classes is a really emotional thing for me because she's still a little year-night Frances to me and then she's running a classroom and running it really well. I remember, I guess you had the most personality of all the teachers, crazy, kind of loud teacher, oh this is different, it's fun, you cared about us as people, I don't think I've had many teachers like that since. Aww, you cry. That's half the reason why I do my job is seeing that growth from my little people up to adults and I love finding out where my students have ended up and just going, yeah maybe I might have had a little part of that. At no point when I lived here did I think that I would be back here 14 years later talking to people about how amazing my time was here. I assumed it was somewhere to go, somewhere to get out of but it's been a wake-up call to me about how important that time out in Mount Isa actually was for me as a teacher.