New awards for students going abroad

Students going abroad, as well as those already abroad this year, will now have the chance to compete for awards. These awards will act as an incentive for students to produce visual presentations of their years abroad, whether they are on exchanges, studying or working. It also does not apply just to ERASMUS students but all those taking years abroad.

The aim of these new awards is that the visual presentations, be they photography or video-based, will be used to demonstrate to students interested in taking years abroad exactly what they may experience. The plan is for the presentations to be shown together at a show similar to a careers fair, early in the autumn term, to allow both first and second year students to make more informed decisions when it comes to applying for years abroad.

Students’ Union (SU) President Leo Boe stated that an intention behind this is to encourage more people to think about going on exchanges, and said that “one of the problems of trying to encourage people to go abroad is that a lot of academics from non-language departments don’t appreciate the importance that this kind of opportunity has or could have on someone’s overall experience.”

He hopes that the presentations will help to provide students from these departments with the incentive and information they need to consider a year abroad, and provide a step toward getting more people to go on years abroad. The idea behind the visual presentations is that “it gives you more of an appreciation” of what a year abroad is like than just through word of mouth, according to Boe.

The awards will be presented once all those who are abroad have returned. The award categories are yet to be finalised, but the idea is to have a main cash prize for the strongest visual presentation, and then smaller prizes for two subcategories: those who go abroad to study and those who go abroad to work. There will also be subcategories under these two sections, focusing on the best visual presentations of the country’s culture, or on the country’s nightlife and other specifics. The provisional judging panel would consist of the SU President, someone from the international office and someone from the World at Warwick society.

The combined money for all the awards will total around £750, taken from the fund available to the SU that exists to help promote schemes that encourage people to go abroad on exchanges.