Enterprise Stories: Tom and Finance Infiltrated

Posted on: 7 May 2021 in Enterprise

A business to help other students save time on applications and become aware of more opportunities.

About Me 

My name is Tom and I have just finished a semester in Denmark. Originally from Shrewsbury, I am 20 and studying BSC Economics. 

My Business 

Since starting university, I have realised the vast abundance of opportunities for students to get experience, be it from Spring weeks or Internships. This has meant that I have dedicated over 100 hours to applications, with success in a Barclays Spring Week, which was subsequently cancelled due to Coronavirus! 

Firms often provide little to no feedback on many of these applications, despite the significant amount of time it takes to do research on said firms, be it for cover letter or interviews. So, I decided to make a website with news on recruiting firms all in one place. 

Each week one of the team will write and publish an article on a firm recruiting for Internships, Spring Weeks, and the like. This provides a unique take on some recent news and all the key information for you to analyse and make your own in a cover letter or interview. As time passes, our resource bank will grow richer with more and more recruiters featured and more news on previously covered recruiters. 

Hopefully, Finance Infiltrated will help other students save time on applications and become aware of more opportunities! 

What is the next step? 

Our aim is to help other students, so naturally the target moving forward is to get more publicity and a wider audience, so as to help as many students as possible. Each week, our resource bank will get richer with a new article from one of the team, should there be sufficient demand we will look to find more writers and provide more content each week. We are also looking to forge partnerships with recruiters. This will allow us to provide them with greater exposure, so that they get more applications, while giving students access to opportunities that they may have previously been unaware of. 

Have you participated in any enterprise activity or programmes at university? 

In first year, I took part in The World’s World Challenge, this was centered around creating a self-sustaining idea that would tackle one of the challenges that the world is currently facing. The university provided several sessions to allow us to form groups with likeminded peers and then shape and develop our ideas so that they could be presented and taken forward.  

I am also VP at Liverpool Entrepreneurs and Networking Society (LENS), where we host various events to provide insight and ideas to help students considering creating their own businesses. In first year, there was a university funded trip to the NACUE Student Enterprise Conference, with various workshops on idea development and talks from other entrepreneurs. While a highlight this year has been a talk by former Liverpool student Bethany Heron, who also started her own business at university. 

The best thing that I have learned is to utilise your network. There are so many like-minded peers at university with useful skillsets and ideas of their own that may enhance yours. By reaching out through LinkedIn and other contacts I have created a team of reliable and dedicated peers, who all have their own unique take on writing and the business. Beyond this, all I can say is: just go for it. Every business has mistakes at first, the best way to learn is by doing and university is the perfect place for this!