It is a surprising item that says something important about the aspirations of its owner. She's been homeless in Melbourne for almost three years, but Alicia*, 19, is studying Year 11 at RMIT University. Alicia's two-piece suit hangs in a homeless camp under an inner-Melbourne bridge. Not many high school students start their day at a soup kitchen. But Alicia does. She and her boyfriend walk to a North Melbourne drop-in centre for a warm breakfast before Alicia travels into the city. She attends classes Monday to Friday at RMIT's Melbourne campus, which offers Year 11 and 12 subjects.

Unlike a traditional high school, the students who attend RMIT do not have to take part in extracurricular activities or subject themselves to long, boring assemblies with the school principal. Most of Alicia's school work is done in class, otherwise she will go to the State Library, Youth Projects homeless service, or study alongside her tent by lamplight. Her favourite subject is legal studies and she dreams of becoming a criminologist. "I'm not one of those people who want to be married and have kids," Alicia says. "I want to start my career first." In recent months she has been taken under the wing of Youth Projects chair Melanie Raymond, who was shocked to find Alicia in a drop-in centre doing homework among a throng of homeless men one afternoon. "All she asked me for that night was a couple of highlighter pens, some folders and some paperclips," Ms Raymond said.

Alicia was doing homework in a drop-in centre when Youth Projects chair Melanie Raymond met her. Since that first meeting, Alicia has been helping Youth Projects establish a new youth advisory group. She also attended a women's leadership camp while living on the streets. Ms Raymond says Alicia is a young woman with "huge potential". "If you can stick at Year 11 (which is tough for most teenagers) from under a bridge, you're as tough as nails. I would employ anyone that has overcome that adversity," she said. But as the days march on and Alicia remains living under a bridge, she is statistically more likely to stay homeless and lose grip of her dream of a professional life. The rough-sleeping student is currently surviving on a budget of $360 a fortnight, shared between four homeless people.

"I always run out," she says. "I'm dead broke now." Unbelievably, Ms Raymond said Alicia was recently told she was ineligible for a grant for financial assistance for "at-risk youth" to finish their education because she was already homeless. Over the last seven months, Alicia and her friends have been camping in overgrown and tucked-away corners of the city. They constructed a shanty among giant weeds and a pair of willow trees on the edge of an unused industrial paddock in North Melbourne. Using liquid nails, they built their own "lounge room" and were in the process of adding a second bedroom to the hut when the site's owner discovered them. They were literally chased away, threatened with trespass and Alicia was forced to leave her school books behind.

The hut Alicia and her friends built in an unused paddock in North Melbourne. That day, they walked for hours until they finally found a new place to stay – a concrete bridge shelter alongside a creek a short distance from the CBD. Protected on both sides by long grass and bushes, it is prime squatting real estate. Only dog walkers and the occasional graffiti tagger ever venture down the overgrown riverbank. Sometimes Alicia and her boyfriend set up their camp chairs in the gentle winter sun and watch the ducks paddle along the slow brown creek. IT is at this almost-scenic location that it becomes easier to understand something about Alicia that will probably frustrate some who read this story.

In the past year, she turned down a number of offers to stay in youth refuges or share houses. She says her previous experience of living in shelters with other young people escaping homelessness were so traumatic, she would rather live on the streets until she is able to get a unit of her own. "I know it probably sounds pig-headed because it is a house," Alicia says. "But I have been to a youth refuge and it was horrible. You got stuff taken. There were drug and alcohol issues. It's not like here where you can come home and relax. There are always police at the door." Alicia's current camp under the bridge is more of a home than the place she grew up, with parents who were not poor but refused to buy her new school shoes, even when the old ones had so many holes they had to be patched with silver duct tape.

She was just eight or nine years old when she first spent nights sleeping on the streets (often in a cabin of an old boat moored at a marina) seeking a temporary refuge from her violent family home. And her tent is cosier than the peeling weatherboard cottage she stayed in with seven others in Brunswick, which was infested with rats and had an abandoned methamphetamine laboratory out the back. A cottage that Alicia squatted at on Mountfield Street in Brunswick. It has since been demolished. And it is a world away from Southern Cross Station, where Alicia resided for more than a year when she first moved to Melbourne. She spent days flicking through the free newspapers discarded around the terminal, but could not stave off the crippling boredom. "Pretty much every day was the same day. It was like there was no tomorrow," she says.

At night she would sleep at the station in the waiting room with the padded seats and heating, before a security guard would come and close the room after trains stopped running. She would then move to the bus terminal, where the seats were metal and the room often cold. Sometimes, the security guards would tell her "this train you're waiting for is never coming". While living homeless, Alicia usually wears track pants or jeans and a woolly jumper. She wears little makeup and her brown hair is cut short, just below the ears, adding to the impression she is a bit of a tomboy. But appearances can be deceiving. The black two-piece suit that hangs in Alicia's riverside camp was donated to her about two months ago to use when she was invited to go on a business tour of the Melbourne Magistrates' Court – a day she was repeatedly mistaken for a lawyer. Alicia may be no "girly girl", but she says she loves being able to get dolled up in her suit, heels and some costume jewellery.

It is the only time she does not feel homeless. "It's an incredible difference. The way you're looked at is different," she says. "You feel so much better." *Name has been changed at request of the subject. If you want to make a donation to the young woman featured in this story - supermarket vouchers are most practical - you can contact Youth Projects direct at admin@youthprojects.org.au You can also make a cash donation to Youth Projects to assist all their clients.