2023 Students Award Ceremony
On Friday, 19th of May, South West Gauteng TVET College welcomed over four hundred (400) guests to the annual awards ceremony at the Roodepoort Campus, Horizon View, where more than two hundred (200) students were presented with certificates for achieving three and more distinctions during the 2022 academic year.
Among the attendees were staff, industry and business people, officials from the Department of Higher Education and Training, guests, and last but not least, the ecstatic parents who came to support their children for being part of the top achieving students in both NC(V) and NATED/Report 191 programmes.
The ceremony began with a prayer from Paster Nkululeko Hlubi from Royal Praise Church with a few words of encouragement to all the students that have achieved as well as to those that are yet to achieve, followed by a brief message from the Principal, Mr. Joey Monyamane.
During his message, the Principal, Mr. Joey Monyamane, he commended the students for their achievements, indicating that they have sacrificed many sleepless nights and weekends to achieve the distinctions they have achieved and be where they are now. He further mentioned that these top achievers are not easily persuaded by their peers and have set goals that they strive to accomplish. “With your accomplishments today, many doors will open, and top universities will be headhunting for you without having to apply for a space. Thus I want to encourage you to never drop the ball and always strive to always be resilient as you know you can be,” said the Principal.
Mr. Monyamane also took the opportunity to applaud the lecturers for a job well done in ensuring that these students achieve the best results through their dedication to teaching.
Author of the book titled: The Theatre of the Lator Principle, which is a township narrative that was generated to encourage readers to speak about their mysteries, and the founder of the Lesego TAU Education Foundation based in Dobsonville, Soweto, guest speaker Lesego Tau is indeed a champion for the youth and ambassador for education with all the work that he is doing.
Mr. Tau opened his presentation with a powerful statement to say, “Victory is trapped in your thought pattern” basically enlightening the achievers of the day that if you don’t open your mind to greater opportunities that present themselves and free the mind from negativity, you will never succeed going forward. He spoke of three phases that people go will go through when they start something, namely the Excitement Phase which is the excitement of starting something new, be it a new school or Programme or even a new job. Then comes the Frustration Phase, where you become frustrated when doing the work and things start getting hard, followed by the final phase, the Leaving or Letting Go Phase, this phase is when you usually want to give up because things are not necessarily going right, and you just want to drop everything and let go.
Mr. Tau encouraged learners to always strive to be in the Frustration Phase because that is where learning takes place. “If you want to be great in life, the frustration phase is where you need to stay because that’s where you get saluted and that’s where you learn and achieve.” He further went on to say that opportunities will never come to dine with you if you are not available, one needs to avail themselves of different opportunities that will challenge their mindset. The mind is like a sponge, it constantly absorbs information thus it needs to be fed content. In closing Mr. Tau left learners with a thought-provoking message saying that credentials alone are not enough, work on the weaknesses to attract success, and that posting your plans on social media will not give you miraculous results. Honor the process of becoming.
Njabulo Phiri from Molapo Campus who was doing Report 191 in Electrical Engineering N1 received the DUX award in absentia for being the top student ranked in the college. He achieved an aggregate of 94.00%, passing all his subjects with flying colors.
As normality, guests were entertained during the event by the SWGC College Band, which serenaded them with the soothing sounds of our local musicians to end what was a day filled with pride and excitement from all in attendance.
