04 November 2010

Engineering students at University make cash for charity

Thrifty students at the University of Sheffield managed to use their entrepreneurial expertise to turn small change into big bucks as part of a unique charity challenge.


Third-year students from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering were given a £5 note as seed funding and were tasked with using the note to make as much money as possible - without gambling - over seven days last month (13-20 October 2010).

The task, entitled Turning Problems into Opportunities, formed part of the department´s Creativity, Innovation, Enterprise and Ethics module, which has been run for the past 10 years and aims to encourage teamworking, initiative and ethical entrepreneurial skills.

Students were encouraged to develop their integrity and honesty by firstly brainstorming money-making ideas while resisting the temptation to find out the amount of seed funding they would receive, which at this point remained sealed in an envelope. It was hoped this would encourage the students to be more creative in their brainstorming, without being influenced by funding.

After finally being allowed to find out their seed funding figure, the students set about generating as much money as possible via the host of innovative methods they had devised.

These included organising fundraising games, raffles, offering a cleaning service to locals, selling glow sticks outside night clubs, re-stringing tennis, squash and badminton rackets and recording and podcasting lectures to students, in a bid to assist them with their revision.

Through their enterprising skills and initiative, the students made a total profit of £394.84, which has now been donated to a number of charities, including McMillan Cancer Support, Macmillan Nurses, the Sheffield branch of Engineers Without Borders, Sheffield Children´s Hospital, domestic violence charity Refuge, the Poppy Appeal and RAG, based in the Students´ Union.

The exercise will prepare students for a competition they will face later on in the module in which they will be encouraged to develop ideas for a start-up company and write a business plan for its commercialisation.

Dr Plato Kapranos, from the University of Sheffield´s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, who runs the Creativity, Innovation, Enterprise and Ethics module, said: "The idea behind the exercise is to turn problems into opportunities, to get the students to be creative, to challenge assumptions and to make them aware that opportunities are all around them.

"The project brought together all the issues discussed in class that will be part and parcel of their future working lives. This year the success of the project exceeded my expectations as all groups voluntarily donated their profits to their favourite charities, providing real value to the community. This can be a real life-changing experience and I am very proud of all of them."