Year 12 is huge. You’re being asked to pick a direction for your entire life while simultaneously surviving exam season, figuring out who you are, and pretending you have it together. Cindy Gao will be the first to tell you she didn’t have it together either.
“It was quite a rollercoaster,” she says.
Cindy is now a Business Development Intern at SAS in Sydney, working on their Channels Team. She’s good at her job, she’s clear on why she’s there, and she got here by doing something most of us forget is even an option: asking a lot of questions and following what she was already good at.
Here’s what she learned along the way.
Okay, but who are SAS?
Fair question. SAS – is a data & AI tech company, and it’s been around for 50 years, which in tech years is basically ancient. What they do is help companies make sense of enormous amounts of data. Think: a business has thousands of data points coming in every day, and SAS builds the software that sorts through all of it and pulls out the stuff that matters. Predicting trends, spotting risks, helping organisations make smarter calls.
Cindy has a thing for analogies and diagrams (more on that in a sec), so if it helps: picture a giant, messy pile of puzzle pieces, and SAS is the tool that figures out what the picture is supposed to look like.
Your hobbies are more career-relevant than you think
When Cindy was younger, she always understood things better with a visual. Maths made more sense when she could see it. She was good at problem-solving and creative thinking, but she figured those were just things she liked, not anything that would matter professionally.
Turns out, those things are basically her whole job now.
As a Business Development Intern, a huge part of what she does is take complex technical language and translate it into something customers can follow. Diagrams, stories, analogies. She helps people see the value in software that could otherwise feel completely impenetrable.
So when she asks you, “what are you good at, and what makes you curious?”, she’s not being cheesy. She’s pointing at something real. The things you do naturally, the ways your brain works, the stuff you find easy that others find hard… that’s data about who you are and where you might fit.
Learn how to pitch yourself
Cindy’s number one piece of advice for young people: learn how to sell something. Start with yourself.
Not in a “list every achievement you’ve ever had” kind of way. More like, can you walk into a room and clearly explain who you are and what you bring? Can you get to the point? Can you say something interesting in 30 seconds without rambling or underselling yourself?
That skill, the ability to communicate your thinking out loud, concisely and confidently, will take you further than almost anything else. And the flip side of it is listening. Not just waiting for your turn to talk, but showing up present, engaged, curious. People share more when they feel heard.
The good news is you don’t need a job to practise any of this. You can start in literally any conversation.
Your subjects don’t have to become your career
Cindy loved science at school. She also knew, somewhere deep down, that she didn’t want to work in science forever. That realisation was uncomfortable, because if not science, then… what?
What helped her wasn’t a quiz or a career aptitude test. It was conversations. Lots of them. School counsellors, teachers, friends’ parents, alumni who came back to talk about what life looked like after Year 12. She’d listen to someone describe their day and ask herself: could I picture myself doing that?
It’s such a simple thing, but it works. Because most of us have no real sense of how many careers exist out there. We know the obvious ones. We don’t know the thousands of roles that are just… out there, quietly running the world.
The subject you’re best at in school is a clue, not a contract.
Get outside the classroom before you feel ready
If Cindy could go back and tell her younger self one thing, it’s this: don’t wait until you feel ready to try something.
A club. Volunteering. Work experience somewhere random. It doesn’t have to be prestigious or perfectly aligned with your “career goals.” The point is just to be somewhere that isn’t school, doing something that doesn’t get graded, and paying attention to what comes up.
How do you handle situations when things go sideways? How do you work with different kinds of people? What bores you? What surprises you about yourself?
You can’t get that information from a website. You have to be in it. And every time you try something, even when it goes badly, you come out knowing yourself a little bit better. Which, when you’re 17 and trying to figure out the rest of your life, is probably the most useful thing you can collect.
Learn more about careers with SAS here.
