Our team started in 2018, when 7 students got together to take part in the Bilbao Night Marathon for the charity Mind. It was many of the teams first year at University and we were looking to do something amazing that will make our free time valuable. We spent many weekends doing amazing fundraisers including cake sales and bike marathons in order to reach our target. We grew together as a team and I can confidently say that so many of my strongest relationships at University were developed because of this opportunity. I also had the pleasure of watching other students in my team develop and showcase their skills through the whole year.

Coming up to the end of the year we decided we needed to do more challenges as a team, and we wanted to find a way to make these challenges available to the all students at Huddersfield. Working together we developed the University of Huddersfield Challenge Society, with members from the Bilbao team taking up important roles within the team. We worked with Choose a Challenge to decide what challenges we wanted to do but also started to develop our own challenges. The society structure is similar to that of Choose a Challenge we have students who play the role of challenge leaders, promoting and establishing our challenges. We are now an established society at the University and have an amazing team working together to ensure all students have the opportunity to do something amazing.

After months of development the society launched in September 2019 and the work began to fill our challenges. Over the first few months support for the society grew from the 7 original members to a remarkable 138 members. With this we took on three Choose a Challenge, challenges which we ended up with over 20 members taking on amazing trips around the world. We have also tripled the total fundraising output we have per year, whilst introducing new charities to our University, this is something we are very proud of and it forms the basis of our main aim each year.

The society has given the team freedom to book rooms and stalls to be used for meetings and fundraisers around the University. It has also developed a community of amazing people who are all striving to better their own lives but also support great causes around the country. Establishing the society has also allowed us to utilise the University to the best of our abilities, advertisement soared this year which is likely the main reason we received so much interest. We can now also rely on the Students Union to support us and push our teams further, allowing us to reach even greater fundraising goals each year.

For me the society represents the power that students can have to make a real change, we have not only built a community of amazing people, but we have also used our position to promote charities and campaigns around the University. This includes campaigns such as Travellers Against Plastics and our continued support for opening sporting opportunities to all students regardless of their circumstances.

Huddersfield was not my first time at University, when I went to University for the first time, I found myself feeling isolated and spent a lot of time on my own. But thanks to this team I have built a group of friends that I feel I will take forward with me for life. The society and Choose a Challenge have given the opportunity to build relationships and develop myself in ways I never expected. It would be my advice to all to take on this amazing opportunity but to not only allow it to be a one- year thing. I now have the chance to take on more amazing challenges but to also share my love of adventure with others. Whilst I agree taking on any challenge is an amazing feat, I would still always say that making it an everlasting legacy is truly something special.

Many people will look at this and think that it must take so much work to set something like this up and I cannot lie it can be challenging. However, the team at Choose a Challenge and at my Students Union supported me from day one, offering me advice on how to build and grow the team in a way I could have only hoped for. My interpersonal skills such as my teamwork and communication have developed so much, and I now feel confident to promote events like this and speak to people I would not have normally had the chance to talk to.

I am now coming towards the end of my time at University and will soon be leaving the Society to focus on my final year. However, I look at the team we have with confidence that the society will grow year on year. We have built the foundations of something very special and feel that the team will be in place to offer these opportunities for many years to come. I would always say to others that they should try make something more from their challenge. If given the chance build a team that can carry on the amazing work you have done whilst at University, allow yourself to look back on your time and realise how much of a difference you have made to the students of the future.