Practice Week

Hello again,

I briefly mentioned in my last post that we were going to have a practice week which is a week away from the normal time tabling. Now in my third and final year of my Business Management degree at the University of Bedfordshire this is the fist occasion where we have had the experience of a practice week. I think all courses offer different practice weeks differently and for us we were give the task of pitching two event ideas to a panel of lecturers and panel of other judges.
We were given a selection of projects to pitch towards -

1. Our own £50 project to raise money for a charity of our choice.
2. A £250 University of Bedfordshire 'RAG' Charity event
3. STEPS events for Students at the University to become more interactive
4. A National Rail Way project
5. Other

Day 1: We came together as a group and decided which events we wanted to pitch towards and then ranked our 3 choices in order of preference.

Day 2: We then decided on our ideas as a team and then allocated roles to all individuals within the group. We then went away to write up our notes to come back the following day to add out notes to the presentation to ensure everything flowed and nothing was duplicated.

Day 3: We came back together as a group and added notes to individuals slides for the presentation. We made sure everyone was happy with the final product and then a final design was added to the slides which was linked to our event and then handouts were printed to hand in with out pitches.

Day 4: As everything with the presentation was pretty much complete we decided to go away and practice practice and practice our individuals slides for the presentation so we could present in the highest possible manor.

Day 5: The Pitch Day! Both presentations were in the afternoon so we decided to come together in the morning for a few hours and go over and over the presentation until we were happy with the outcome and we were in the required time allowance for the pitches. Overall, they both went extremely well and we are going ahead with a really exciting event which we are currently preparing for to take place during March 2014.

Overall, Practice week was a great experience and helped us work under pressure to achieve a goal at the end of the week. Usually we have a few weeks to prep for presentations and so on but having less time did feel slightly more stressful but in the end we achieved everything we wanted to as a team.