Olivia McLeod

Olivia McLeod was drawn to a career in psychology because she wanted to understand her own troubled upbringing. “I wanted to understand myself and see how I could use that education to help others,” she explains.

“If you grow up in a certain adverse environment, sometimes you think school isn’t reachable for you and that shouldn’t be the case.”

She’s determined to use her Brighter Futures Scholarship to discover how she can best understand others and encourage them into a brighter future for themselves.

“When I found out my scholarship application was successful, I felt like a big dream had come true,” Olivia says. “Finding out that Brighter Futures Scholarships are funded from donors, alumni and even staff just blew my mind. It’s an amazing feeling knowing that many people care about others getting access to an education.”

Now in her third year of a Bachelor of Psychology, Olivia has plans to continue her educational journey with an honours year and hopefully also a PhD. She’s using her funding to ensure she can balance work, university and her mental health needs to ensure she can also help others in the future.

“My career goal would be to research people who score highly on the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) test because current research states that those who score 4/10 on average have a reduced life expectancy of 20 years. I personally score 8/10 on the ACE test and would love to find out what determining factors contribute to a person either turning to maladaptive coping strategies such as drug addiction versus other people using their adverse experiences to be resilient and successful.

“This research has the potential to change the lives of children living in foster and residential care,” she explains.

In her spare time, Olivia works in foster and residential care, and she also has ideas on how she can have a greater impact on the youths she works with. “I’d like to write a self-development book called Turning Trauma into Gratitude about how I overcame feelings of resentment towards the people who raised me. I realised that they did the best they could with their limited capacity due to their unresolved trauma. As the saying goes, ‘hurt people, hurt people’—the saying made me feel a great deal of compassion for those who abused me.

“Ultimately, I am grateful for everything I went through because I wouldn't be me without it. I intend to write this book so others can break the cycle and find self-love through helping others.”

Initially, Olivia wasn’t even sure she’d attend tertiary education at all. Having never completed grades 11 and 12, she had to do a Griffith Bridging Course to even have a shot at applying.

“Getting my results back for that bridging course and knowing I would most likely have entry into my bachelor was the best news I had ever received,” she says.

Then in her first year, her efforts were rewarded with an Academic Excellence Award. “That was the biggest and best achievement of my life and really helped me learn a little bit of self-compassion and self-love—to believe in myself and what I'm capable of and what I can do with my future.”

She says she felt buoyed by receiving the Brighter Futures Scholarship and wants to continue pushing through her own childhood trauma to reach success. “Sometimes you just need a cheerleader who can shout from the sidelines to give you that little boost that you need—I think that’s what the Brighter Futures Scholarship is. It’s not just the money but the fact that so many people they’ve never met want to see them do the best that they can.”