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Advice for: Students, Parents and Carers | College Applicants | Apprentices
The Students’ Union also holds a student-led and organised Staff Awards, where staff are commended for the part they played in helping the students reach their full potential.
SU officers are the organisers of this event and they plan the whole evening from start to finish, balancing this commitment with their ongoing studies and exams. The experience that they gain is enormous and develops many different skills that they can be proud of and boost their CV.
We caught up with SU Vice-President Andrew Morris, about how he and his team organised the evening.
A big part of organising any event is keeping a track of finances.
Andrew said: “Once we worked out the rough costings of the items that we needed, we agreed on a set budget. We worked within this by using in-house services such as printing, catering and music, so that costs were kept to a minimum, whilst still ensuring quality.”
Andrew and his team knew that they needed to be organised and well-prepared with the timeframe that they had to organise the evening.
“We set out clear deadlines, including nominations and when things had to be put in place by. I think this worked well as we had run out of things to do before the event, meaning that we were well organised.”
Communication skills are a huge part of organising any successful event and come in useful during your future career, too.
Andrew said: “We had to manage the guest list, which was hard work, as we had to find out who would be attending. The Student Experience team were really helpful with communication as they could liaise directly with staff, but we wrote emails and communicated the voting system.”
As the team were not all in College on the same days, they kept their communications together via social media apps, so that the team could pick up on tasks and keep everyone in the loop.
When organising events, you will undoubtedly come across challenges and problems. Overcoming challenges is a really important skill to learn for your future career.
The Staff Awards team had to work within the budget to ensure that the event was a success.
“A big challenge was getting prizes for the raffle that we held throughout the evening. We contacted businesses around Canterbury to donate prizes, and the College also donated prizes. We used the remainder of the budget to buy two large prizes so that we could raise some money for charity.”
Find out more about the Students' Union here
