Indigenous students

[Music]

Jumbunna is a special place for Indigenous students to come together to feel supported. It's a wonderful space where they can study, chat with staff, chat with fellow peers. We're really here – we exist – to enable their success.

Jumbunna currently has over 350 students from all different communities from across the nation. Particularly given that a lot of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are first in their family to come to university, Jumbunna then plays the role of their family when they're away from their family. 

Jumbunna provides students with a range of services including academic support, learning support, we can help students with housing, we provide meals for students, there's free printing services, there's a computer lab, we can assist students through a pathways program where we tailor their pathway to university individually.

Coming from Darwin, Jumbunna's actually set me up with accommodation here and I found that so helpful. You know, coming so far from home, I don't know what to do and where to go, and everything they've done so far has helped shape where I go in my life and especially in Sydney, it's a massive city compared to Darwin and I wouldn't be as straight and narrow as I am if it wasn't for Jumbunna's help.

Through Jumbunna they actually support you by giving you an ITAS tutor and so that gives you a lot of extra support whether you're doing whatever degree there is, they have a person there that helps you with whatever it is you're studying, and so not only that, they have the staff here that are trained and they know what they're doing so they're here to support you through it all.

They've offered me opportunities that I wouldn't normally have as a student, this being actually attending UTS. I would have had to wait a lot longer to actually get in but through Jumbunna, they actually made it possible to start and just transfer everything over with no hassle, no issues and I was really appreciative of that.

Jumbunna has supported me through enabling access to tutors, to counselling, to health advice, we have access to Aunty Glendra whenever we need to have a chat about something, even little things by offering us food and drink whenever we come in and it feels like you're you're talking to your mob when you're here. Even when we're all from different places, it feels very much like a family. 

I would definitely recommend studying at UTS, especially if you're Indigenous because the community here, they're just lovely and they love you and they take you in and it doesn't matter where you're from, what stage you're at, or how much you know, how much you don't know, they just take you and they show you the way.