Posts Tagged ‘sife’

Authentic is remarkable in a world of fluff

July 16th, 2009

The SIFE Australia national competition had a unique group of four finalists. Bond University with a charismatic speaker who’s booming and soothing voice that could sell you the most undesirable thing in the world. Melbourne University with an impressive corporate structure that was a bit intimidating, but it put everyone in awe. Western Australia’s wide rage of projects with results to cover all bases

Yet the most remarkable team on the day was a small genuinely “aussie” team from the University of New England. They were the underdogs who made it to the semi finals for the first time. Making it to the finals was an even grander acheivement for such a small team. While other teams had abundance of resources, strategic planning, business analysis, structured approach to their projects and presentation, the team at UNE was authentic. Other teams tried to be too corporate, UNE told a story of a struggle, a narrative with an open ended happy ending. Other teams tried to fluff up their projects by using key words and jargon that says little about what they actually did. What the hell is a “structured and strategic qualitative analysis plan”? UNE was not afraid to tell the true story because they had nothing to hide, because “they’ve actually done shit”, in the words of one of my team mates. They were genuine, they were believable, and most of all they were remarkable. They were the team that was most talked about at the cocktail party. They were the team that that left an impression on people’s minds. They were the team that everyone secretly wanted to win.

UNE may not have won the competition, but they won our hearts as SIFErs because they’re the kinds of teams that SIFE should be creating.

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SIFE UNSW Team Receives Recognition at National Competition

July 14th, 2009

I was going to write a more personal version of this, but it’s taking too long, this is the media release that I edited about the SIFE National competition I attended last weekend.

Sydney, NSW 13/07/09

The UNSW SIFE team celebrates as we return from the 2009 National Students In Free Enterprise competition. Our dedication and hard work has paid off when we made it into the semi-final round of the main competition while picking up $2000 and a 10kg block of chocolate for winning the Cadbury Schweppes most inspiring community initiative award for our Indigenous Enterprise Project, a project that took team members to Northern Queensland to help Djarragun college address the issue of welfare dependency in their Indigenous community.

The SIFE UNSW projects for 2009 were:
• Indigenous Enterprise project – presented by Bernise Alviar
• Social Endeavour Prize – presented by Elaine Wong
• CarbonBusters – presented by Cissy Zhang
• Egyptian Ethical Tourism (EET) – presented by Prianka Nair
• Fully Frugal – presented by Edy-Theo Darmaputra

Our president Simona Das gave the team sustainability report, while our tech and design girl Sandy Do controlled the presentation. Special mention goes to Chantal Nguyen, Nicholas Ng, Shan Cao, Khiem Tudo and Nitasha Bhatia who also contributed enormously to the team.

Our member of 4 years and exec of 3 years Bernise Alviar was in tears of joy as she was recognised for her commitment to SIFE winning the “most outstanding SIFE student in Australia” award. Bernise has put in a spectacular amount of work for SIFE UNSW as Vice-President. She has inspired many students with her passion, marketing skills and strong leadership over the years. Her prize includes a trip to Berlin to attend the 2009 SIFE World Cup.

We lost to stiff competition in the semi-finals to Bond University, University of New England, Melbourne University and University of Western Australia. Congratulations to those four teams! Every one of them uniquely deserves to be there. Bond had the charismatic vice president whose booming voice put the audience in awe; UNE, the down to earth underdogs, had a remarkably authentic Australian vibe that epitomises the entrepreneurial success story; Melbourne inspired us with the grandeur of their organisation and with their impeccable execution of their presentation.

In the end it was UWA whose incredible achievements this year won the SIFE pride of the audience as well as the marks from the judges, taking out first place as winner of SIFE Australia National Competition 2009. They will be representing Australia at the 2009 SIFE World Cup in Berlin later this year.

Our UNSW team went into the competition not knowing what to expect, and we returned with morale higher than ever with a burning passion for the SIFE cause!

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SIFE UNSW: the revival of frugal

January 30th, 2009

Well not quite.

Let me explain. For the past couple years, I’ve been the IT Manager of SIFEUNSW, the UNSW division of a much larger organization Students In Free Enterprise, which aims to bring young entrepreneur’s attention to non-profit charities.

One of the projects that we had in 2006-2007 was “Frugal: The magazine that made cents”, pun intended. The goal was to create an self sustaining online business magazine targeted at young people. Every week, the SIFEUNSW team working on frugal would approach people to interview, write guides to educate young people about personal finance, etc.

I only joined SIFE shortly after the end of the SIFE year (July), and did not see this project in operation, but from what I can tell, it was quite successful. Unfortunately, Andrew, the project leader for Frugal had already graduated that year and would not be participating in SIFEUNSW in the following year. Progress for the project halted as the beginning of the new SIFE year came around.

This is not uncommon for a project at SIFE. Much of the focus of SIFE is around an international competition held every year in July where hundreds of university students from various countries in the world present their projects to a panel of judges in front of an audience of fellow SIFErs, sponsors, charity workers, and successful entrepreneurs. SIFE teams spend so much time preparing for this competition, that once it ends, there is a period of relief and celebration that usually means down time for projects.

Unfortunately for Frugal, we never recovered from that down time and we were just short of making the project sustainable which would only require a few volunteers who enjoy writing, and a few regular guest posters a month, but building a team like that is easier said than done when nearly all of our human resources are business students who are busy studying and often also working.

The project has revived in the form of “Fully Frugal” which is a video version of the project with similar goals, but there has been no new content on Frugal since mid 2007.

Oh, and why is frugal ‘not quite’ reviving? I just noticed a 30% increase in traffic on website this month reversing a slow downward trend.

frugal_sife_trend

I wonder if the financial crisis is making people google for financial advice and driving up the traffic. The site is pretty well SEO optimized despite not having any new content for over a year.

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