Becky Oliver
Lincoln University

This conference started out for me not knowing a lot about APEC or many of the speakers that I read about in the programme.

Getting straight into the programme I found Mike McDonald a very inspirational speaker. He showed me that failure shouldn’t stop you from achieving your goals, but just makes you more determined to achieve them. I feel having the APEC and ABAC speakers at the start of the conference was a great idea. It taught me the key structures of what we were going to discuss over the next 2 days.

The presentation from Blair and Rachel spread such a passion amongst the group and it was wonderful to get the true feeling of APEC.

I felt that listening to all the speakers, I learnt a lot of lessons that I will remember for all my life. I found the 10 speakers to be very valuable as you gained their key values and history in a short time that was expanded on in the presentations on Friday.

I felt it was good to have to do a presentation on the person we interviewed. It gave me a very in depth understanding of many underlying issues to APEC and business in general.

The only thing I found hard was having a very little amount of down time. But we just bargained off sleep for more networking time! This allowed us to meet and chat with all the other talented people attending the conference. I have made some amazing friends and will be in contact with many of them for a lifetime to come.

Scots College was a wonderful venue and all the people that put in the hard yards to organise this event did a fantastic job. The VTM Trust has some wonderful assets in their team. Brilliant, vibrant, knowledgeable people!

This was an incredible experience, which I feel so honoured and privileged to attend. Thank you so much for the opportunity and I look forward to keeping a close eye on APEC submits for many years to come.