From A-levels to Intern

I am currently taking a gap year where I have chosen to work for an organisation that has an impact on young people's lives. Tellmi is an amazing, anonymous app for young people who are suffering with their mental health and I highly recommend it. Having found it difficult to adjust at my secondary school, I was targeted by bullies for the most part of year 9 and 10. This hurt me a lot and I lost a lot of confidence within myself. As I joined the 6th form, I became a peer mentor where I spent every week, for a duration of two years, seeing a year 7 student to offer my support. Peer mentors were only for year 12s but I was the only student who stayed on in year 13, despite having to sit my A-levels. I did this as I am someone who loves to help others and I wanted to help the student get to the other side like I managed to, thanks to the support of older pupils being supportive of me when I was younger.

As mental health means so much to me, I took on the role of becoming an intern for Tellmi. Here I have been working all across the company from marketing and advertising to working with the delivery team, such as going into schools to talk about the importance of Mental Health and using Tellmi for support. Lately, I have been working on an exam stress campaign. There is so much information out there, but what is actually useful? Or relates to young people? Well, we first asked young people on Tellmi for tips on how they cope with exam stress to support the wider community and they came up with some brilliant ideas. Inspired by their support, we have also included over 20 resources in the Tellmi directory that relate to exams. These resources include revision tips for beating exam stress, TED talks, motivational speeches, breathing techniques, podcasts and that's just the start.

I believe that the uniqueness of Tellmi is that it is an anonymous app. Being male, I find that in today’s society males are always told to hide their emotions and not cry. Some are often told to ‘Man up’ and ‘Not cry’, I feel that this shouldn't be the case and that it should be classed as a normal thing whether you are a man or woman to show emotions. With Tellmi being anonymous, users are given random usernames within the app where they can talk to other people who might be feeling the same. Posts are checked by the moderators to make sure they are appropriate and users can refine their feed by what they are interested in.