York graduates express flair for adventure
Posted on 10 July 2006
Young Entrepreneur
Department of Management Studies student Sara Johnson's has won two awards in recognition of her entrepreneurial skills.
Sara, 22, from County Durham, won the North East Shell Livewire Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2006 award and was runner-up in the national final at Claridges in London last month.
Earlier this year, Sara's business Crafter's Companion was awarded the title of North East Small Business of the Year. The business markets craft products and also designs, manufactures and sells their entire product range of craft CD ROMs and Scoring Boards.
Sara has travelled to the United States and to the European Trade Fair in Paris to promote the company and she hopes to launch a range of new products in 2007. She was attracted to a career as an entrepreneur during her studies which resulted in a First Class Honours degree in Management -- her dissertation focused on new product development, spotlighting her own company's flagship line.
Native American historian heads West -- again
Giving a lift to a Native American dressed in a tuxedo -- and claiming to have been Crazy Horse, a Chinese monk and an Irish whore named Molly -- is hardly a conventional way to gather information for a dissertation.
But the unconventional hitch-hiker, travelling to the Pine Ridge Reservation, was just one of the people History undergraduate, Daniel Merrett interviewed in summer 2005 during a visit to the Lakota Sioux's sacred tribal lands in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
To research his dissertation Modern-day Lakota tribal members' attitudes to the Black Hills and the issues surrounding them, he recorded tribe members' attitudes towards the Black Hills and the area's tumultuous history.
Daniel collected a wealth of interesting stories, though he later discovered that an over-indulgence in magic mushrooms may have been the reason for the tuxedo-clad interviewee's rather startling revelations.
After graduating from York, Daniel, who is from Portsmouth, will head West again - but, this time, only as far as Devon, to do a PGCE course at Exeter University later this year. He hopes to become a secondary school History teacher.
Energetic high-flyer
After graduation, Edward Jackson, who has gained a first class MEng in Computer Systems and Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science, will undertake a 150-day overland tour from Istanbul to Cape Town. Travelling on a specially-equipped truck through 16 countries, the journey will include the Dead Sea, the Valley of the Kings, Serengeti National Park and Mount Kilimanjaro.
Returning to the UK for Christmas, Edward will then travel to Dalian in China to teach English for eight months -- he gained a diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language while self-studying a 60-hour online course during the Easter holidays.
On his return from China, Edward, 23, and from Seaford, East Sussex, will join Deloitte & Touche in London, where he will work towards an Associate Chartered Accountant qualification. He previously worked at Deloitte on its highly competitive Summer Internship at the end of his third year.
Edward's first year at York was particularly memorable -- he was awarded the Ede and Ravenscroft Prize for academic excellence and an outstanding contribution to the Department and University life, had a summer job in the Information Systems Management department of the Royal Household at Buckingham Palace, and was accepted on to the North American Exchange Scheme to spend his second year at the University of California at Santa Cruz.