When they’ve found out I’m from BU, every organisation I’ve walked into has been really impressed. And without my degree, I certainly wouldn’t be in this job.”
I started Bournemouth University in 2008 and joined the BA Honours degree in Events Management - it was a sandwich degree with a placement in the third year.
BU has really good industry links. I did extra courses like e-marketing and business management and on all of those I was introduced to other businesses locally. Through that I came across the company I did my placement with, and actually came straight out of university and took employment with them when I graduated. I spent four years in total with my placement company but I always wanted to go into the charity sector. It’s really hard to get into and so I kept watching and waiting for an opportunity to come up. About nine months ago, I saw this job opportunity come up - the RNLI is an absolutely fantastic organisation and I was thrilled to get a foot in the door for an interview and be offered the job.
The Events Management degree at BU is really business-based, so there’s a lot of finance and a lot of marketing involved. At the time I think, for some people, it was difficult to understand why you need that for events, but actually events covers so many different businesses. There’s an events management person in every single business sector that exists so it’s really valuable to understand all of those things. In my previous role I dealt a lot with investment banks so being able to understand finance was really crucial. So the course prepared me really well by giving me an all-round view of how business management works rather than just specialising in the events side of it all.
BU’s industry links for me are something that I always promote to people because they’re so strong. The lecturers seem to have fantastic relationships with local businesses and also a lot of lecturers are from those business backgrounds. They’re not just lecturing on something they read out of a book, they’ve actually been there and done it.
They can give you real-life examples and base things on their own experience, which is a really powerful way of learning. It’s just got a really fantastic reputation and I think that comes from those industry links, and from where the lecturers themselves have come from. It’s just got an amazing reputation.
When they’ve found out I’m from BU, every organisation I’ve walked into has been really impressed. And without my degree, I certainly wouldn’t be in this job. So it’s been incredibly valuable to me.