Undergraduate of the Year Awards Ceremony

As I have mentioned in a couple of my previous blogs, I have been involved in the search to find the First Year of the Year in the Undergraduate of the Year Awards. Last time I wrote about it a couple of months ago I was through to the final 10 and now fast forward and it was time to find out the results. The pressure was most definitely off a bit thanks to knowing I’d already won the Royal Academy of Engineering Advanced Leadership Award, but still I was really looking forward to this.

The awards ceremony was held at the East Wintergarden, a fantastically modern events venue at the heart of Canary Wharf in London. It was an amazing venue, although the glass roof combined with the brilliant sunshine combined to make it incredibly hot! But in any case, the first couple of hours were spent chatting to the sponsors and the other finalists – it was nice to see that a couple of people that I attended the assessment centre with had also made it through to the final. I also managed to grab a quick word with the guest presenter Michael Portillo, who quite bizarrely I had seen on the TV less than 12 hours previously! I tried to see if I could get him to come and give a talk to Fish on Toast (the Student Union’s business and entrepreneurship society, which I have just become the Marketing Director for) and he seemed reasonably positive about it! I’ll have to keep my fingers crossed though!

Once the initial networking was over we were invited downstairs where a spectacular lunch awaited. I won’t go into as excruciating detail as I did last time over such things, but suffice to say it was something special. You know, I could really get used to this kind of lifestyle…

Next, it was time for the main event, the Awards themselves. My category was one of the last, so there was a nervous wait while the other awards were presented before we would finally find out. They started with all the usual things you would expect, saying it was an incredibly hard decision for them to make and that in reality we were all winners. However, we realised they weren’t just being a “walking cliché” as they put it when they announced that in fact we were all going to be offered a job with them over the summer! Excellent! Now, the pressure was well and truly off. In the end they still had to pick an overall winner, which wasn’t me, but I really didn’t mind. It had been a really enjoyable process, followed by a great ceremony and culminating by setting the stage for what should be an exciting summer. I can’t wait to get started now!