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A little thinking goes a long way…

Who says graduates don’t get opportunities?  Who says we are sheltered from the real world?  Well, I can safely say from experience, that’s not how you’re treated in the BTC!  Several weeks ago many teams entered into a ‘Dragon’s Den’ style competition, each required to pitch an idea to several of the company’s senior executives, or in this case, the dragons, based on one of four key areas:

Media and Entertainment
Health and Medical Care
Education
Technology
 
I will not write much more about the day, as this has already been covered by a post from John Reynolds and second external post from David Evans of the BCS.  The fallout from this competition, named the BTC Challenge, was for a few select teams, a second pitch to a more targeted audience. 

In a nutshell, our idea was to create a desktop widget used to download and view selected TV shows from all of a leading UK TV Broadcaster’s back-catalogue, absolutely free.  The TV shows would have embedded 20-30 second targeted advert clips which would be refreshed each time the user connected back to the service.  The full show, including adverts, could then be converted and transferred to portable devices via the widget for watching on the go.

Although we didn’t win with this idea, our pitch caught the interest of one executive, who used his network of contacts to arrange a second presentation to the COO of a major UK Broadcaster.  What an opportunity; I was blown away by the mere thought of it!  An executive taking time out of his busy schedule to arrange this was, to me, a credit to the company’s internal politics; the fact that he allowed us free reign of the presentation and agenda, and attended merely as an observer showed complete faith and trust in the abilities of four graduates with only 10 months of IT consulting experience.

The presentation was kept very informal, and after a brief description of our idea it became much more of a Q&A session where, in a very surreal haze, a senior figure and lead thinker of the company was asking for our opinions on technical and business issues.

Following the presentation we had a congratulatory lunch where we reflected on the experience, and each came away with a great sense of achievement – we had been given the opportunity to represent our company and had not disappointed!

So, are we sheltered from the real world... ‘computer says naaaoooo’.