Alumni of the SU - Iain Campbell

For our latest edition of #AlumnioftheSU, we spoke with Iain Campbell, a former Sports Union Honorary Treasurer and Ultimate Frisbee Club President, and a Mechanical Engineering graduate at Edinburgh University.

"Joining the SU's finance committee was really the start of my involvement in the sport industry beyond competing. My club president let us know in the committee group chat that there were still open seats about midday, with the deadline being 5pm the same day. I made a gut decision to give it a shot. If I remember correctly, it was an impassioned outburst about why we should be funding a kickboxing competition, that got me noticed and later in the year I was asked to run as honorary treasurer.

Luckily my first year on exec lined up with the extra support offered to SU and club leaders through the CVA and was followed by getting to be part of the pilot leadership award (including free breakfast rolls) in my fourth year. This along with seeing my work make a difference was really what gave me the skills and confidence to go for it and try to make a career working in sport.

If I look back at my decisions to get involved, they weren't planned, I didn't feel ready and worried about how I'd manage the responsibilities. They were still some of the best decisions I've ever made. There are not many places where a 19-year-old is given a say in a budget of 3/4 a million pounds or the opportunity to work so closely with professional staff in delivering projects.

Playing sport at uni is something else, tournaments with hundreds of competitors, a remarkable tolerance for being rubbish and everything in between.

Managing a club and being involved in the Sports Union were such major responsibilities that they're most of what I talked about at interview, even after I'd had my first sport job with Scottish Gymnastics. Now working for BUCS, I see day to day the impact that student volunteers have on so many lives and more recently getting to see how valued they are by employers."