EY Academy CSR Challenge 2015

“Do the best you can. Winning an award is secondary.”

Achievement

Bryan Kan, a Year 2 student majoring in Accountancy (Professional Accounting and Legal Studies stream), won the Champion of Top Performing Cadets award in the EY Academy CSR Challenge 2015, one of EY’s annual competitions. Bryan’s team also won the Best Promotion Campaign in Facebook award.

Background

Twelve teams, each consisting of eight to nine undergraduate students from local Hong Kong universities, competed in the Challenge. The theme for 2015 was entrepreneurship. Each team was given a start-up business to analyze and had the chance to directly communicate with the founder/co-founder of their focus company. Two cadet mentors and two EY mentors helped each team.

Along the Road

Teamed up with eight students from CUHK, HKBU, HKU, PolyU, and UST, Bryan was selected as team leader. He thought the other students chose him to lead the team because of his easygoing personality. As a leader, he was the liaison between the team and the company’s founder. Furthermore, when disagreements and conflicts arose, he had to resolve the issues, keep the team spirit high, ensure everyone’s participation, and make sure a consensus was reached. Bryan found the greatest challenge was persuading a particular team member, who deeply believed in his own ideas, to change his mind. He worked hard to ensure that everyone was on the same page and due to his persistence and his belief that in a team everyone’s ideas had to be considered, eventually everyone agreed with the team’s decisions. “It was a tough job, but I think it was necessary to keep us together as a strong team,” Bryan said.

Bryan seemed to have a relaxed attitude to the competition aspect of the Challenge. He said, “what you need to do is try your best and forget about the awards and then the awards will find you.” He also said that it was passion, honesty, a humble attitude, and willingness to learn that led to their success.