In Your Shoes - Simone Kortung

Simone Kortung is a final year student at the University of Dundee. She works part-time as Online and Social Media Leader at The Enterprise Gym, a university department run by students for students and overseen by UoD staff. All activities offered are for free and aim to develop students’ enterprise skills and commercial awareness. Prior to her employment with the department, Simone actively participated in these activities for two years. Now she talks about what it’s like to be on the other side of The Enterprise Gym.

Teaching Business Creativity

The Enterprise Gym runs a module tailored to level 2 business students on Mondays. Today we practised the application of the design thinking process on problems in society. We presented the students with scenarios through video and they then analysed ‘pains and gains’ and came up with innovative solutions. This is the second year this module is run. I wish it existed back when I was in my second year. Neil Bowie is a fantastic teacher with an eye for filling the gap between academics and employment and the students are sure to benefit greatly from this module.

The Lucky Winner

During Freshers’ Week we ran our annual Treasure Hunt together with the Careers Service of the university. Now we met with the lucky winner and presented him with the first prize, an Amazon Kindle. We run engaging competitions like these on a fairly regular basis throughout the semester and receive very positive feedback from students. Now it’s time to start preparing the greatest of them: TED Hunt.

Networking Success at Abertay

On Wednesday our team went to the 20:20 Vision Conference which was hosted by Elevator UK and Business Gateway and took place at the University of Abertay. We enjoyed listening to the fantastic speakers but also used the chance to bring our stall and network with Abertay students. This led to a high increase in Abertay students participating in our Enterprise Challenge on the very same night. We host Enterprise Challenge workshops over 7 weeks each semester and students get to decide whether to attend on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays.

Last Call for the Enterprise Challenge

This Thursday marked the last chance for students to participate in the Enterprise Challenge this semester. ‘The Sales Coach’ Sandy McCurdy led the final of our three ‘Generating Ideas’ workshops this week. The team worked very hard on promoting this last chance to start - and complete - the challenge this semester, an effort that was well rewarded. In the past the trend was for participation numbers to drop in this exact week, but this time they increased instead!

Website Development Ahead

Today were the School of Computing student presentations - they've worked on developing a new TEG website for us and interacted as a customer/client, which gave them a 'taste' of how real projects are run.  We also awarded a prize for the best presentation to one of the eight teams. This has been a very intense 3-week project and we are delighted with the results.