My watch is over

My journey with the UCL Entrepreneurs started right in the beginning of my first year. By a series of coincidences, I went to some of their events and decided that I wanted to be part of the group of very excited people not knowing much about entrepreneurship myself. Following on that, I also realised that London being the European entrepreneurial hub is probably the best place to learn more about entrepreneurship and everything connected to it.

It was last October and I, being an excited first-year, wanted to join the committee and eventually became the First-Year Executive, working closely with the leadership of one of the biggest student societies on campus. As the year went and I learned more about the world of startups, venture capitals and met more and more people connected to the entrepreneurial world, I decided to run for a leadership position within the committee. And that’s how I became the Vice-President of the UCL Entrepreneurs Society and where the story to the title of The Best UK University Society started last March.

Being in charge of a society with 42 committee members and over 700 official student members can sometimes get a bit intense. Those 42 people work together on bringing events and programs to the society members - and since the membership is not always required to take part in our initiatives, a lot of non-members across all study courses often joined our programs as well. There wasn’t a week in the past year when I wouldn’t be having calls or meetings with some other committee members or the President of the society. But for most of the time, I was surprisingly enjoying it – working with a group of passionate people who became my friends on projects that immediately transform into reality.

I would have never thought that I could host an event with the COO of Google or decide which student startup will receive the funding of £4000. We organised hackathons, series of workshops and lectures, a shadowing program, UK’s biggest startup fair and even managed to launch an online platform for connecting university students with hiring startups. My favourite experience was perhaps the London Startup Fair in which we worked with the Imperial College and LSE Entrepreneurs societies on bringing more than 40 London startups to UCL and therefore providing direct access to some of the most exciting London initiatives across various fields to almost 1000 university students. Or organising the Business Game was also an incredible experience - we selected 100 students to participate in a two-day case study competition closely collaborating with Amazon, EY and Goldman Sachs who each contributed with one challenge for the participating teams.

Working on all of that with the group of incredibly talented and inspiring people was a challenging but rewarding experience and receiving the NUE Award and a huge check for £1000 was a nice touch to the end of our watch and a great reward for the hard work we all put into the society in the past year. Now, full of warm feeling of satisfaction, we can pass it onto the next year’s committee and enjoy the well-deserved rest from meetings, emails and more meetings.