Urban/​Regional Planner

My name’s Steven Sanson, originally from Kaikohe and I’ve studied at Pompallier College in Whangārei for high school. Tribe - Ngāpuhi, I’m from yep, studying a Bachelor of Planning which is pretty much yeah Town Planning. It presents the opportunity to make decisions for the community or any community that you’re involved with, it’s quite a sort of a red herring for Māori like not many people know about it but it’s quite a good thing to get into if you’re interested in community grass roots level sort of stuff, getting involved with you know local interest groups oh anything you’re passionate about it’s the rout to go because you can actually effect change.

Not many people really know about town planning in general, let alone Māori families, they think it’s party planning or you know planning all sorts of other stuff but, yeah it’s not really known to all my other mates but once I tell them they get a good grasp of what it’s about. We should start to open up and be involved with it cause it really presents opportunity for us to develop change and be in a position to make good decisions, long term decisions. It presents a lot of opportunities in local government, central government, politics, even law if you’re into that, so it branches quite a wide range and nothing’s off the table with town planning everything’s involved, every subject is involved.

My dream one day is to help out all our local communities that we live in, help them rise up and become better in all aspects of their well-being.

My brother had gone to university and he told me all these great stories, so the only thing I was kinda fearful of was kinda being away from home for so long, there is a bit of homesickness but you do get over it, you end up having the time of your life really, it’s awesome, it’s awesome.

I really admire my family they’ve really helped me along the way, but one particular person I probably have to say is Bruce Hucker, he’s an ex-Council member and he’s really he’s a great role model, great wordsmith, great in the art of speechmaking and it’s really quite a sight to see and I really, really admire him.

If you are going to university I’d say go through the hall system first, cause it really presents the opportunity to make a lot of friends, and also brings that social aspect into university and that’s real good. You’ve gotta have a social life, part of varsity’s studying, but there’s opportunities to play sport for university, there’s obviously you can go out socialise, make a lot of new friends, and yeah, nah it’s not just about university at all there’s quite a holistic you know sort of thing about it, playing rugby for the university for about three years now, it’s one of my big passions but I’ve been injured so it’s all good. If you’re afraid of leaving all your Māori friends behind you do make a lot of new Māori friends so that’s pretty cool. University’s not as hard or as scary as it’s portrayed really it’s just if you put the hard work in it you’re going to get the results and you’re going to find it quite easy, but probably my best advice is just to give it a go, if you don’t give it a try you’ll never know.