A KEDGE Alumnus is biking from Bayonne to Athens to raise awareness about cancer!

I joined the Bachelor programme at Kedge Bordeaux after obtaining my scientific bac in Bayonne. During my schooling at KEDGE, I played for the XV du Poussin and participated in an exchange programme with BEM in Dakar, which till this day remains one of my most memorable experiences. After my Bachelor's I decided to pursue a Master's at Toulouse Business School, where I specialise in management control. I am currently taking a gap year.

 

I was able to do a six-month internship at the end of my time at Kedge in Ireland, at the European headquarters of Hewlett Packard International Bank, as a treasury controller. After this experience, I decided to, for the first part of my gap year, do an internship in another international company's headquarters: Geodis Logistics Services. This time as a Management Controller. In September  2018, I will start my Master 2 in Toulouse with a speciality in management, and want to find an internship in an audit agency for my end-of-studies internship.

 

 

I am currently in the second half of my gap year, and I am working on a project with a friend from Bayonne, Timothé, who is also a student at TBS. Starting in May 2018, we are going to go from Bayonne-Athens on a bike to raise awareness about youth affected by cancer, who are receiving support from the student association Cheer Up. The association visits youth in hospitals to help them realise their personal projects, whether it's swimming with dolphins, participating in Formula 1 racing, participating in a sporting event, or learning to play guitar. We help them become actors of the projects they are building. Last year, Tim and I participated in a hitchhiking race with Into the Ride, to fight against cancer, which was organised by TBS students. This year we wanted to go further for these young kids by taking on a bigger challenge. How is our trip going to help these kids? We want to raise 10,000 euros, of which 5,000 euros will go to helping at least 5 youth realise their personal project. Additionally, we want to share this project with them as much as possible. Every day, from their hospital rooms, they will be able to follow our progress in live, discover the landscapes, the cultures, as well as communicate with us, and suggest daily challenges. We also want to be a source of hope for these youth, and as such, every day of our trip we will collect encouraging and hopeful video messages for the kids. And, if some of the kids want, they will be able to do part of the trip with us. 

 

In the future, we would like for the project and association to gain in notoriety. We are therefore working to contact other associations present in the different countries we will be crossing to see what we can organise with them (events, meetings, etc). We are open to all of their suggestions! We really want to find someone who is in remission that can come pedal a few days with us, that it going to be an important part of our work over the next few weeks. We have launched a campaign to find partners, and we are currently being supported by a few companies that believe in our project. We are continuing to contact companies. We have also launched a crowdfunding campaign, so that anyone can contribute something to the project according to their means. 

 

Our project video/teaser was shown on TVPI, a local channel in Basque Country. We are also in contact with Sud ouest, with whom we are studying the possibility to have a few lines published about that project that would increase our visibility. We will also have a radio interview on RTL2 in march to introduce our project to listeners.

 

 

On the professional side, my education helped my find the field in which I want to work later. First of all, thanks to the numerous internships I was able to do through the programme, but also because of the quality of the classes in management control. The Bachelor's courses helped me learn to structure my project. Launching a project like this requires a lot of skills that I acquired in school. Communication is an important component in a project such as ours, you have to know how to share it with people, whom we are asking to trust us and the project. You need to be really professional for that: write a proper email, keep the partner updated about the project, research the person/company you are contacting. During my Bachelor's, I specialised in finance/management control in my last year. The entrepreneurship class really helped me establish the budget for the project. For the class, we had to create a design brief for a company with the cost of every single item. It was good to know the method, which I used to prepare a real and detailed budget. 

 

Carry your projects to the end! If you believe in your project and you are 200% motivated, you will be able to convince people and get their support. 

Don't hesitate to contact me via our Facebook page, or by email if you have any questions about the project. For the crowdfunding campaign, there is no small donation, every donation helps us build the project together. If you know of any companies that could be interested in the project, don't hesitate to contact us! We have a non-profit status and all donations and partnerships are tax deductible at 66%.

 

Website: http://yourhopeescape.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yourhopescape/

Crowdfunding: https://www.helloasso.com/associations/federation-cheer-up/collectes/yourhope-escape

Mail: yourhopeescape@gmail.com