Thriving culture of prizes and scholarships
The Law School has thriving culture of prizes and scholarships which involves collaboration with and taking inspiration from influential global Partners. This culture has been introduced and developed with Dr Radek Stech taking up an appointment as the Director of Prizes, Bursaries and Scholarships in November 2015.
Our culture of prizes and scholarships is based upon two core guiding principles: ‘beyond marks’ and ‘beyond money’. The first relates to the criteria upon which the student winners are selected and includes extracurricular activities, community engagement and leadership. The ‘beyond money’ principle encourages the students to take advantage and think in terms of wider developmental opportunities offered by the donors.
These principles can be explained by best practice examples. One of our students has recently been awarded the Freshfields Stephen Lawrence Scholarship which selects eligible scholarship winners based on innovative ‘exceptional talent’ criteria developed by Freshfields and offers unique development opportunities in a large commercial law firm the City of London.
Radek is currently finalising “The Ashurst Outstanding Law Student Prize” with Ashurst partner, Mark Edwards – a new prize which will be awarded for the first time in 2017. The prize will be awarded annually to a single final year LLB student based on criteria which take into account stellar academic achievement but also leadership and wider skills application achievements over the course of their degree programme. The winning student will receive a financial award and attend a dinner at Ashurst London. The prize panel will include Richard Edwards and other Law School Colleagues.
Radek has also collaborated with Kimberley Payne from the Oxford University Press to amend the criteria for the OUP Victoria Williams Memorial Prize for the most promising first year female of potential to include extracurricular activities. Dr James Griffin has been administering a Google prize to sponsor a PhD student’s attendance at a BILETA conference.
Dr Radek Stech will continue developing and co-designing the thriving culture of prizes and scholarships with global Partners and Colleagues internally. He was nominated, as one of the key persons, who will collaborate with Freshfields on its intended expansion of the Freshfields Stephen Lawrence Scholarship in a small number of pilot universities to other disciplines beyond law. He will collaborate with Ashurst to develop further innovative schemes in 2017.
Date: 15 December 2016