Welcome to Keele Management School. You are joining us at an exciting time, as we establish our new degree structure and embark on a variety of enterprise initiatives with our partners in the world of commerce and industry. By following one of our programmes you will find that your time with us is as much about your personal development as your academic achievement and we encourage you to see these two activities as closely related. As Head of School, I would like to invite you to take a look around and make the most of your studies with KMS.

Professor Matthias Klaes, Head of Keele Management

As part of the assessment for the new Business Plan Module, final year students presented their business plans to a ‘Dragons Den’ style panel of judges.The Keele ‘Dragons’, comprising both academics and representatives from business, grilled the students on the marketing, financial and operational elements of their plan, as well as assessing their general presentational style and skill.The students were divided into teams of three to put together a 45 minute presentation for assessment. Business ideas were very wide ranging and original including carpet cleaning, fancy dress and Green Express – ‘the healthy way to take-away’.The judges were very impressed with the

quality of the plans as well as the professional approach adopted by the students who came ‘suited and booted’ ready to make an impression.

Enterprising Students Impress Keele Dragons

Medici FellowshipDr. Caroline Miller, Lecturer in Marketing, recently took part in the Medici Scheme, a Midlands university enterprise with local businesses and communities. The scheme provides training in business and intellectual property issues and aims to develop a close working relationship between active researchers, undergraduates, postgraduates and academics in order to forge links with other universities and the wider business community.Medici fellowships have helped staff and students develop their skills and knowledge about enterprise and both undergraduate and postgraduate students have benefitted by gaining an insight into how business functions. By taking part in this scheme Caroline was able to develop a network of contacts in industry and consequently organised a variety of industry visits for students in Keele Management School. One such visit was to H & R Johnson Tiles where students attended a talk by their Marketing Manager, Catherine Spibey and another was to Kerrygold in Leek where students were taken on a guided tour of the factory and attended a talk on marketing. Caroline has also arranged for guest speakers from the world of commerce to talk about how they put theory into practice in their organisations.

Keele Economics and Finance Society

The Keele Economics and Finance Society (KEFS) was established by a group of economics and finance students to support one another with academic issues and to provide help with career planning. The group meets regularly for study sessions and directs any students experiencing difficulties with the course to the appropriate people for help. Their activities are not exclusively devoted to study though as the group also organise regular social events for students to get to know one another outside of lectures.If any students are interested in joining KEFS, they can be contacted via email: kefs@live.co.uk or visit their facebook group at:http://tinyurl.com/yfvze99. Membership is only £3

UNDERGRADUATE NewsFebruary 2010

Keele Management School graduate, Christopher Yeates has already put his degree in Business Management to good use. Christopher, who graduated in June 2009, immediately secured a job with AstraZeneca and has been in touch to let us know about his experience post-graduation.

“Since starting work at AstraZeneca in June I have been given several increases in responsibility. This has lead to me doing a large piece of transition work where I worked as a reporting analyst, in collaboration with Accenture. This involved me working directly with our customers and suppliers to transition all the reports produced in our business area to the new management information reporting team. I have also been recently assigned to a project which involves upgrading an important system within the IT Infrastructure department in collaboration with IBM, working as a project co-ordinator. This involves me working

closely with a project manager.

More recently I have been for interview at Barclays, and have been fortunate enough to be offered a permanent job there. I will be working as a Business Performance Analyst, working in a subset of Barclay’s Global Retail and Commercial Banking (GRCB)

business area called Global Infrastructure Service Delivery (GISD). My key responsibilities will be Management Information (MI) reporting and analysis, and stakeholder management. This offers me great career progression and I am delighted to have been offered the job. I was also in the fortunate position to reject a contract extension at

AstraZeneca working full-time as a project coordinator in favour of the Business Performance Analyst role at Barclays. Now I am just waiting for the paperwork to come through to sign officially.”

Congratulations to Christopher on making a flying start to his career in business.

Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development

The undergraduate HRM course at Keele continues to develop strong links with the South Cheshire and North Staffordshire branch of the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD). This year students have attended CIPD branch events on Employment Law, Diversity Management and Learning and Development. Student representatives will also be attending the branch’s AGM in May. Following Sophie Ashmead (2007) and Andrew Hodder (2008), one recent HRM graduate from Keele will be nominated as student of the year and receive their award at the AGM. Watch this space for further news later in the year.

On the academic programme front, work is continuing to guarantee advance standing (Licentiate membership of the CIPD) for students completing the current HRM course.

Dr Renata StenkaAccounting and

Finance r.i.stenka@

mngt.keele.ac.uk01782 733429

Professor Jan Wenzelburger

Business Economics, Economics & Finance

j.wenzelburger@ econ.keele.ac.uk01782 734372

Prof. Gauthier LanotActuarial Science

g.lanot@ econ.keele.ac.uk01782 733102

Dr Rachel AnnandHuman Resource

Managementr.annand@

hrm.keele.ac.uk01782 733490

Dr Liz ParsonsMarketinge.parsons@

mngt.keele.ac.uk01782 733426

Deborah KerfootBusiness Management

d.kerfoot@ mngt.keele.ac.uk01782 733429

The Undergraduate Course Directors

Hard work means prizes!The annual prize giving for Economics students took place on Wednesday 9th December, 2009. Congratulations go to:

Level 3 winners: Jia Song for Business Economics, Lisa Ironside - Economics, Steven Kew - Finance. Level two prize winners were Luke Dutton for Business Economics, Amir Levy for Economics, Chris Hussain for Finance and Claudia Umland for Management Science. Winners at level one were Peter Youll for Business Economics, Man Sum Siu for Economics, Rongrong Yu for Finance and PM Williams for Management Science.

The successful students are pictured here with Professor Matthias Klaes, Head of Keele Management School and academic staff from the School.

Life after Keele

Bursaries for Actuarial Science Students

Keele Management School is delighted to congratulate three of the students’ on the new Actuarial Science degree programme, for achieving excellent A level Mathematics results, resulting in them receiving one of the School’s £1,000 Actuarial Science bursaries. Katerina Mastridou, Kapila Rudra and Yingjun Cui were delighted to receive their initial cheques for £500 which will go a long way towards purchasing the text books needed for the course.

Katerina Mastridou and Kapila Rudra pictured with Professor Gauthier Lanot, Course Director – Actuarial Science

If you would like further information

on any of our undergraduate

programmes please contact Mrs Chris

Ridley, Undergraduate Team Coordinator

01782 583094 or by email to

eca18@keele.ac.uk