My reflection on my journey of Student Entrepreneurship- Part One

While this Article should have been published a few months ago, perhaps now is as good a time as ever to reflect on the progress the UL Consulting and Entrepreneurship Society has made in the three years of my Presidency.

I shall begin with excerpts from the speech I delivered at our Annual General Meeting (AGM), and expand with some of the highlights that are more appropriately reflected on now that the dust has settled.

A chairde,

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It has been a disruptive and transformative period for everything and everyone in the timeframe that I have had the pleasure of being President of this amazing Society. Dreams have been created and destroyed, opportunities have come, altered, succeeded, and gone by the wayside. However, despite the challenges that I have faced in my role, I wouldn’t change a second of it for the amazing experiences we have all been able to share. My report will be kept as concise as possible while paying tribute to three years of goals, sweat, tears, and many moments riddled with anxiety, turbulence, and ultimately joy.

I took up my role in June 2019 as the UL Entrepreneurship Society (ULES) had its first full year in operation. I received a phone call from co-founder Gabriel Denys while taking a walk on the beach in Lahinch after doing a round of sales pitches in neighbouring areas for the family company Totalcare. I will never forget the rollercoaster of emotions I felt during that 4-minute phone call. We had 97 members, of which to my records, at least 85 went on co-operative education or graduated, leaving the Society’s committee in need of a total reconstruction. I took up the role accepting the challenge of taking the great work done already and implementing my own vision into the project. The Society needed a vision and strategy to be created, implemented, and ultimately ready to hand over. The sporting metaphor of ‘leaving the jersey in a better place’ has kept me up some nights and filled me with indescribable excitement at others; and that is what I strived to create – a Society that could be inherited in a better place than how I did. I created new committee roles, grew, and developed the suite of infoshops I delivered in 2019/20, and later again during AY 21/22. The Society also created and co-hosted UL’s first dedicated Centre for Entrepreneurship on campus and we were also the first student-led entrepreneurial service when we created an alliance called ‘Innospace UL’ with UL Economics and Investments Society, Enactus UL, and both Jack Scanlan and Colin Lynch from UL Student Life. We also went on the second field trip to Intel in Shannon, a strategic development on the trip to Uber in Limerick back in 2018/19.

The pandemic created a suite of unimaginable challenges and consequences, although nothing the Society faced was in any way comparable with the pain, fear, isolation, grief, and loss that many faced during that period. Unfortunately, circumstances in today’s world mirror many of the adjectives that I’ve used above. However, in keeping with the Society’s aims and objectives, we met the challenges head-on and created a varied and entertaining set of events while I was based in rural Ireland and limited to strictly online events. I would like to thank anyone who stayed with us throughout that journey. We had some incredible successes at competitions in particular, and members of the society won thousands of euros in national, local, and in-house competitions. We also had some conversations with guest speakers that couldn’t have happened without the pandemic, so every cloud comes with a silver lining. The many messages saying ‘thank you’ made the effort of running the Society by myself worth every effort of the 596 hours that were committed during that Academic Year.

Throughout this time, I sat on UL Wolves Clubs and Societies Executive and represented the views of the Society in major policy decisions and achieved some major wins for all societies in UL Student Life. Merchandising, creating fair play with income and expenditure entries, new systems for appraisals, and other policies such as gambling, working with minors, and honorary memberships are some of the things I am proudest of – as well as navigating through two Awards seasons, some significant controversies, and driving C&S in creating a safe and supported space for continued online activities during an unprecedented global pandemic. I’m also delighted that this year áine Duffy took my seat while I moved on to pastures new with UL Student Life Council, being elected as Management and Marketing Representative and KBS Faculty Rep. Part of that role allowed me to sit on the panel that ultimately got KBS its EQUIS accreditation, and being able to have the impact on the value of thousands of degrees past, present, and future will stay with me forever.

Whilst sitting on the Executive, a proposal for a new ISCG UL came onto the Slack channel. I was delighted to be able to reach out to Cian and lobby for C&S Executive support for an increased scope for ULES and I received unanimous support for that.

This moves to our most successful chapter. The Society underwent a rebrand that was beyond anything I could imagine, and I want to thank everyone on the committee past and present for their unreserved efforts in getting that set up. With the new Society came an increased job title but reduced responsibilities and I was able to work on what I do best, creating opportunities for members. As Head of Client Projects, I launched and led a project in the previous round of ISCG National Projects, and advocated for the creation of branch-specific projects. I have now been Project Lead for two projects, and the success in getting increased UL engagement in projects creates an exciting challenge for future committees to own. I would also recommend that the feasibility of a UL-specific project be examined in detail, and this will be noted in my handover document.

This year has been an incredible success. We launched new partnerships with LERO, Nexus Innovation centre, WiSTEM2D, University Concert Hall Limerick, and Enterprise Ireland as well as fortifying the relationship between ourselves, Economics and Investments, Enactus UL, Local Enterprise Offices in Clare and Limerick, Student Life, Kemmy Business School, UL PSU, and others. We have launched events that were on my bucket list from day one, and we have achieved everything that I feel I can give to the jersey. We have had an All-Ireland Summit and have a network to create a far wider event in the future, 3x Innovation Competitions ran in-house, partnerships with international competitions, as well as an opportunity for a new committee to take what we’ve done, f*ck it out the window and redefine what we mean by ‘Make Inspirational the Norm’.

This conversation will be continued in Part Two!