Second-year Social Work student Matthew Hicks was recently awarded Camosun College’s 2021 Yvonne Thompson Page (YTP) Co-op Student of the Year Award. Hicks worked as an electrician for 20 years before suffering a workplace injury and returning to school at age 43.
“After a couple years of appointments they deemed it a permanent disability, which made me eligible for vocational retraining,” says Hicks. “So I came back to school and figured I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to completely change my career and have the funding to do so.”
Hicks chose to go into social work; he says that throughout his life he has witnessed the effects of alcohol and drug abuse in the communities he’s lived in.
“It just reinforced all of the social problems that people are facing and all of the challenges that kids are facing,” he says. “And I just really wanted to help.”
Hicks says that the co-op program wasn’t something he initially planned on participating in, but he decided to do so after discussing his education and career goals with his mentors and educational stakeholders. He quickly began to find the program very valuable and impactful.
“The co-op program gives you so many different skills,” he says. “Even for myself, who had a successful career, learning about social networking, building up your contacts for different jobs, learning about professional resume building, doing practice interviews. All that stuff, even if you think you know it, there’s still stuff you can learn, still things you can improve.”
Applying these skills, Hicks did an informational interview at the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction, which oversees income support for those facing barriers in BC. This is where Hicks ended up securing a position for his co-op work term, and where he started to catch the eyes of his colleagues and Camosun’s co-op faculty.
“While he was on his co-op, just the way that he worked with clients—and these are people that are vulnerable—the way that he worked with them showed so much empathy and patience and a growth mindset that his colleagues started to notice,” says Camosun co-op and internship coordinator Sarah-Joy Kallos.
The co-op program traditionally ends with a final report, but Hicks was asked by his co-op mentor and Social Work instructor at Camosun to create a presentation for her first-year Social Work students. He agreed, and incorporated into the presentation information on different levels of government programs, how his experience relates to social work, and his own thoughts and feelings.
“Word got out and within the week after I gave that presentation I was contacted by people at Camosun, all the way to the president,” says Hicks. “I was contacted by the co-op program, the Social Work program, and various representatives at Camosun. Then BC Public Service got ahold of my presentation and I started getting contacted by all different levels of government across BC.”
Hicks did several more presentations at Camosun and at various levels of government. He was also asked to write a blog, which was shared on the internal provincial government website. When Camosun’s Applied Learning, Co-operative Education and Career Services department got together to nominate a student for the co-op award, they looked at factors like how students had impacted Camosun’s community and their own workplace. Hicks was chosen for the award.
“I think the thing about him is he’s very approachable, he’s very accessible, he’s very kind, and that connects with people in a big way,” says Kallos. “I think that’s what allowed him to be so successful in his workplace and in making an impact.”
Since receiving Camosun’s YTP Co-op Student of the Year Award, Hicks’ award application has been passed on to provincial and national co-op associations. Hicks has chosen to stay in school for another year, and has been invited to apply for a permanent position with the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction.