Santander Universities celebration event

Study trips, internships and enterprise

Santander's Matt Hutnell (left) is pictured with the University's Vice-Chancellor, Professor Bob Cryan, when the University renewed its partnership with Santander Universities initiative in 2017.

APRIL saw the sixth annual Santander Celebration Event on the University’s campus.

As well as placing a conveniently-located branch on campus, Santander Universities also sponsor a growing number of student activities at the University, including study trips, internships and enterprise.

Matt Hutnell, the Director of Santander Universities UK attended the event, alongside Regional Director Damien Mullaney and a number of local Santander management.

On the day, PhD student Hazel Price described her trip to Heidelberg University in Germany, where she had the chance to meet with Dr Beatrix Busse and Ingo Kleiber to discuss linguistic techniques used in British newspapers and state-of-the-art tools for diachronic corpus linguistic analysis.

A group of engineering students visited Fujian Normal University (FNU) in China, along with the Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, His Royal Highness The Duke of York, KG. Huddersfield has a Joint Programme with FNU, with teachers from the University teaching in China and students from FNU coming to Huddersfield.

Huddersfield graduates Lisa Benfield, Daniel Knight and Matthew Oldfield also presented a video on their internships with local companies and showed how Santander Universities had helped them into their first job. The companies themselves also thanked Santander for giving them a chance to take their companies in a new direction and at low-risk and low-cost.

Daniel Fisher-Jones introduced his business, Liverpool Audio Network, which brings together key players in the Liverpool music scene and Kierhardy Ansell talked about his Skate It Yourself venture, which trains young people across West Yorkshire. Both will now go forward to the Santander National Entrepreneurship Awards, where they will receive additional support and have the chance to secure a substantial investment for their venture.

Molly Marrison, the Vice-Captain of the University’s Football Team also attended. Earlier this year, Molly went on a trip to Barcelona FC under the programme where she took part in training at the famous Nou Camp Stadium and then watched the Barcelona team in a Champions League fixture.