16 October 2009
The annual Make Your Mark Challenge seen four teams of students from South Eastern Regional College (SERC) compete in the UK’s largest enterprise challenge for secondary schools and colleges. The teams came from right across the College Campuses in Bangor, Lisburn and Downpatrick.
This year the Make Your Mark Challenge saw over 70,000 students across the UK take part in the one day initiative. The theme was “Don’t be a Carbon Copy” and students were asked to come up with a product idea with a local link and a low carbon footprint.
The Make Your Mark Challenge encourages students to work as part of team, plan and manage a project, identify and make use of individual strengths and develop problem-solving qualities. To help them develop an idea each group was provided with a mentor, this year two advisors from Action Renewables kindly volunteered their services which provided a great source of information on low carbon technologies.
The Downpatrick team came up with the idea of a high street based download kiosk with multiple payment methods, allowing customers to download music, movies and digital books and rewarding them with eco discounts.
Downpatrick local, Nathan Smyth,who studies Business Studies at SERC, (shown with lecturer Campbell Miller) had this to say about the Make Your Mark Challenge; “This event was a great opportunity for me to put into practice the theory I have learnt surrounding business studies, I was able to call upon my knowledge of financial planning and marketing to help the team come up with a viable business idea.”