Jasmine

Five of my friends and I organised a multicultural event in June 2013. We had to organise the event from scratch, which meant finding a venue, finding people who would help out and raising funding for it. We had some help with the funding from the Envision Group who gave us the opportunity to win up to £500 by pitching our idea in front of judges. We won the full £500 with the catch that we had to raise another £100 ourselves. The extra £100 was raised through a cupcake sale at our school. The sale was so successful that our school asked us to host another cupcake sale for Red Nose Day.

When organising this event I was in charge of marketing so I had to make the posters and advertise on social network sites. This went well but I was more interested in managing the money side of the event. Two other people in the team were the finance directors, which meant they were in charge of the money. However, over time I became the finance director, since I was handling the bulk of the money more and more. I realised that I had a strong interest in finance during the ‘Through The Looking Glass’ week in October 2012 as I got to see a larger variety of jobs that are done in the finance industry.

During the summer of 2014, Lesley invited us back to do a two week internship at Lloyds Banking Group. There I was able to view the financial business aspects in more detail, as the internship allowed me to visit different departments where I asked questions about specific jobs.

Returning to school, four of my friends and I participated in a business initiative scheme that my school had recently started. Our business idea was to create a recipe book that represented the different ethnicities within our local community. The recipe book was titled ‘The Trust Menu’ after our Trust school. The book consists of seven chapters, six containing three course meals from a single country, and the last chapter contains a three course meal which fuses British food with ethnic food. We were able to sell the book to many organisations such as Catlin, Tesco, and Canary Wharf Group plc. We raised over £5000 which has been divided between our group, and saved for university expenses.