National Volunteers' Week: celebrating the School’s volunteer community
This week, the Management School is celebrating Volunteers’ Week along with large charities and small grassroots organisations. This is a time to recognise the contribution millions of people make across the UK through volunteering.
We would like to say a huge thank you to all of the School’s alumni and friends who volunteer their time to support students, alumni and our strategic objectives. We are fortunate to have a committed and active volunteer community who advise on the School’s direction, provide informal mentoring to students and have recently taken part in a range of online guest speaker sessions as part of ULMS Extra’s extra-curricular panels, as well as module and programme-level talks.
A thank you from one of our students.
Joseph Parikh (above) recently sat his final exam on the BA Accounting and Finance programme and is due to start a graduate role in audit with KPMG. Joseph attended the ULMS Extra ‘Big Four Boot-camp’ sessions then arranged a separate conversation with one of the panellists from KMPG, Cara McNally (BA Accounting and Finance 2019), who advised Joseph on how he could stand out at interview stage with the firm.
Celebrating our new volunteers
Layla Al-Azzawe (BA Business Management 2019) started her volunteering journey with the School at the start of this academic year, taking part in an online session during Foundation Week: 'What I wish I'd known as a first year student,’ followed by sitting on an online panel that assessed pitches from the top five teams participating in the ULMS Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project, where our students worked with students from the University of Georgia to solve a business problem.
Layla explains her motivations for getting involved: “I was inspired to get involved in the Foundation Week session as I recognised it was going to be a challenging time for first year students joining ULMS during the pandemic so I wanted to help in making them feel supported. In terms of the COIL project, I took part in Camp America during my own time at university so recognised that this new project would provide a useful opportunity for ULMS students to gain some of the skills they would develop from completing a trip similar to the one I took, such as intercultural communication and effective team working.”
Recognising longstanding volunteers
Volunteers’ Week also gives us an opportunity to recognise the support from our longstanding volunteers, such as Professor Michael Osbaldeston OBE (BSc Biochemistry 1969; Master of Business Administration 1971), who has been a member of the Management School’s Advisory Board for ten years and is one of two academic members on the board.
Michael reflects on how he first got involved and his highlights: “I accepted an invitation to join the Board from a former Dean when the University discovered that I was an alumnus from as far back as the 1960s/70s and was, by that time, Dean of Cranfield School of Management. I am particularly proud that ULMS has become a "triple crown" accredited business school (one of only about 100 in the world!) having achieved EQUIS, AACSB and AMBA accreditations. As I was previously Director of EQUIS at EFMD, I was able to work closely with the school to help prepare the faculty and staff and steer them through the various accreditation processes.”
Thank you again to our volunteers – we hope you know how much your time and support means to the School, our students and alumni community. If you would like to find out about volunteering opportunities available, please contact Hannah Norris, the School’s Alumni Engagement Officer: hannah.norris@liverpool.ac.uk.