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Next week, Billi McCarthy-Price will be in New York, taking part in the United Nations forum on Indigenous issues.

"But I don't have any contact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students at UWA," said the Arts/Science student.

"There are 167 Indigenous students here and the only contact I have ever had with them was through sport. That really upsets me," she said. "It's all very well to talk about Indigenous issues at the UN, but we need to bring it down to this level. We all need to have more day-to-day contact with Indigenous people and we all need more cultural competence."

Billi is one of two students chosen to participate in Global Voices, a not-for-profit movement that gets young people involved in international issues.

Rebecca Dracup, an Engineering/Economics student, is going to Kenya in June on a UN sustainable development study tour.

"We'll be visiting UN projects on environment, habitat and development and we'll be helping an NGO to build a sanitation facility," Rebecca said.

"I'm looking forward to making new connections and learning how the UN operates.  But the field work will be great.  I'm considering a volunteer year with Engineers Without Borders, and this fortnight in Kenya is part of my decision-making process."

Billi's fortnight in New York will be spent reviewing the recommendations made by the forum last year.

"They were based on economic and social development, culture, environment, education, health and human rights," she said. "One of the major practical outcomes in Australia has been the Closing the Gap campaign in Indigenous health," she said.

Billi was born in Darwin and said her parents had always worked with the Aboriginal community. "I was brought up with the idea that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have a special role to play in our society," she said.

"I would like to develop that and help to make a change on our campus.

"To prepare for the forum, we had to come up with a research proposal and write an opinion piece and a research paper for the Global Voices website.  My research looked at programs and strategies to help decrease poor social and emotional wellbeing in Indigenous youth populations and whether these were culturally sensitive and relevant."

One of Billi's three majors is Psychology and she said there was very little Aboriginal health training in her course, "even though this is an area in which many psychologists will end up working."

A side area of her research project was whether universities could begin to incorporate cultural competency into the curriculum to adequately prepare and educate future mental health professionals.

Rebecca's research looked at funding for sustainable development projects.

"Each year diarrhoea kills around 760,000 children under five," Rebecca said. "Diarrhoea is entirely preventable with today's technology. Access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities can reduce these deaths, but so much infrastructure is left damaged and unused due to inadequate funding allocated to its maintenance. For example 30-40 per cent of water pumps in Africa are now broken and neglected."