How I won the TARGETjobs Undergraduate of the Year in Low Carbon Technology (Part two)

Declan Bryans is back with more about his journey from TARGETjobs Low Carbon undergraduate of the year applicant to Low CarbonUndergraduate of the year winner. This week he discusses his arrival at the award ceremony having found out that he was short-listed and finally winning the award. 

Upon arrival at the award ceremony, the place was massive and the building was beautiful. After registering we were all escorted upstairs to a glorious reception which even had their own miniature orchestra playing, very suave indeed. Once I had met up with all the other finalists and EDF Energy representatives we were shown our seats for the lunch. The whole afternoon was wonderful, and an excellent way to celebrate my 21^st to boot. After a delicious lunch the point of the afternoon came where the award winners were announced and you could practically feel the mixed emotions in the air from excitement to fear. I’ll be the first to admit that doubts started crawling into my mind and the fact our award was one of the later ones to be announced the doubts kept building up.

Eventually, the moment came, the next 20 to 30 minutes felt like a couple of seconds, my name was called out as the winner, I was then up on stage accepting the award, getting pictures taken to giving a journalist a note of how I felt; the journalist was really good as she managed to translate my exasperations to legible English. The next few days after that became a blur. My university was ecstatic that I had won and I have received multiple emails congratulating me on that fact. It felt good. I was soon up on the website as one of the success stories I have read when I was in first year, feeling determined to replicate that success in the story I had just read and now I have.

I am extremely excited to be working with EDF Energy and I will continue to blog about my experiences with them throughout the summer. I have been asked to give advice or tips to anyone looking to enter this competition and I have this to say. Just do it! It’s worth a try and give it your all, if you’re not successful it’s an experience and there is always next year. Thanks for taking time to read my blog, I promise I will practise and get better for the next blogs to come!

Congratulations to all the award winners and finalists for the Undergraduate of the Year awards 2012.

If you feel that you have what it takes to be 2013's Undergraduate of the year in your sector category, why not pre-register your interest here. http://undergraduateoftheyear.com/