This is our new summer internship scheme for entrepreneurial students like us! Please click on the button that best describes you:

Thanks to everyone who submitted their feedback to Will for our speaker, Chai Patel, a couple of weeks ago. He's made this amazing word cloud of your responses!

I (Tony Kissack, President of the University of Southampton's entrepreneur society, Fish on Toast) believe that we've had a really great year.

Our events speak for themselves.

Not only have we had:

• Mark Prisk (Shadow MP for Business in the UK),
• Tony Raven (Researcher and boss of the company behind Laser Eye Surgery; Tony sold his company for $890 million in 2000),
• Gary May and Steve Mills (President and Vice-President of the National Association of Sales Professionals),

and many others, Fish on Toast has seen an unprecedented growth in new and exciting areas.

We are currently in a select group of entrepreneur societies across the country (including UCL, Cambridge and Oxford University) who have set up the National Association and Consortium of University Entrepreneurs (NACUE), an entirely self sufficient governing body for the entire UK. We have also markedly improved relations with local business. Our final event of the year is testament to how much bigger our profile has been throughout the year. The Entrepreneurs' Placement Scheme will be bringing together local businesses interested in furthering their business significantly, but also giving our members invaluable business experience. On top of this our members attendance at various networking events in and around Southampton has never been greater.

Oh, and did I mention that our Vice-President has been the keystone in setting up a SIFE team in Southampton (putting us on a national and international platform). This has increased our University's impact to as far afield as Madagascar and Sierra Leone, where a micro lending project, and a rice growing project (respectively) are being funded and part run by students from our University.

We have also run two conferences (Innovation and the Environment, and the Web Entrepreneurship Conference) this term, bringing in John Denham MP (the man when it comes to university funding); Tom Ilube, an ex-director of Egg.com; as well as many others.

Although we got off to a bumpy start this year, we learnt from our mistakes and the benefits of those lessons will be seen next year with James' unwaivering enthusiasm to encourage more students to start businesses, in the form the Business Plan Competition. This should be a truly spectacular opportunity to raise awareness of what we do in Southampton and help us become an even greater society. The competition is modelled on Cambridge University's business plan competition, which has been running for 10 years and consistently chucks out million pound revenue businesses. We at Southampton should aspire to matching such extraordinary results. Again, through our endeavours to properly establish the competition we have already built stronger links with a Venture Capitalist fund, HSBC corporate lending in Bournemouth, the South East Development Agency, Business Link and ECS.

I really do believe in Fish on Toast and I wish everyone the very best of luck. It does seem like not too long ago that I joined, and I started my first company with James Pipe our incoming president. I'll be sad to leave and I'm going to make it my mission to be worthy of that podium myself in not too long!

Adios Everyone and Safari Njema!

Tony Kissack

President - Fish on Toast 08/09

e - tony@tonykissack.com

m - 07814866848

w - www.linkedin.com/in/tonykissack

w - www.tonykissack.com

P.S. as a result of our ridiculous improvements this year we are now getting very close to being able to attract such names as James Caan (Dragon's Den) and Richard Branson, who are now all in the pipe line to come and talk next year.

Last weekend, Tony Kissack, Chris Houghton and I (James Pipe) travelled up to the Microsoft headquarters in London for the launch of NACUE: The Leader's training weekend. It was an incredible event, organised in the most part by Victoria Lennox, outgoing president of Oxford Entrepreneurs. Both days had early starts but the whole event was EPIC.

Tony stayed at his sisters but Chris and I bunked up in a hostel north of Hyde Park where we probably both caught swine flu from our South American backpacker room-mates. The sweaty situation was made even worse when a couple of the girls we met at dinner said their uni had paid for two nights in a twin room at the Crown Plaza!!! (We'll sort that out next time!)

Day One

started with an awesome talk called 'Goals for Success' by Huston Spencer He got us all to close our eyes for the first 3 minutes to get us "out of our heads"...right!

After that, Lars Lindstedt, head of Microsoft's emerging business programme, told us about all the great stuff they're doing to help small start-ups like some of our Fish on Toasters want to be. I even got to talk to him a little more on the London eye and he explained why he made his job title "Software Economist"! On the Saturday evening was kicked off with an amazing meal at the Crown Plaza hotel followed by the brilliant Mike Southern and his keynote - "The Beatles". Afterwards we were whisked off to the London eye where we went for a double flight with champagne and canapés (it's alright for some eh?)!

As if that wasn't enough, we were finally dropped off at the Adam Street Private Members Club on the Strand. We hobnobbed with the entrepreneurial elite of London - and the 100 other legendary students who also attended the weekend.

Day two

was all about knowledge transfer - we set up the "NACUE South" region with big hitters like Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol to name a few. Tony will be co-chairing the Southern area next year (so we are hoping for some Fish on Toast preferential events!

Microsoft's Paolo Barone showed off Microsoft's cool new technologies like Surface (which we played on), Windows 7 and Photosynth. Needless to say, the shamelessly geeky among us all have Windows 7 installed on our laptops now.

The incredible Julie Meyer, founder of First Tuesday and Ariadne Capital was the closing speaker. She's one of the most influential women in Europe and it's easy to see why. Check out Entrepreneur Country to find out more about their manifesto for positive change in the world through entrepreneurship.

Overall, an absolutely brilliant weekend and I recommend everyone gets involved next year to make NACUE as powerful as it should be. I see government lobbying on its way!

On Tuesday 28th, in only 3 hours,

420

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts were sold to raise money for the award winning SIFE projects.

Hope you all enjoyed them!