Wednesday 19-12-2018 - 10:05

Bristol SU has a number of societies which have been accredited with gold status on the Balloon Accreditation Scheme. We caught up with Bristol Civ Soc to find out more about their student group.

What do we do?

Our main goal is to try to enhance the University experience of our members through hosting a number of social and informative events over the course of the academic year. Our social events allow members from all years to get together and have some fun, and range from ice-skating to joint bar-crawls with Bath University. The highlight of our social calendar is the annual Winter Ball, this year sponsored by our gold sponsor AECOM. We also run a number of networking events that host some of the largest engineering employers in the city. These include our very own Graduate and Undergraduate Recruitment Evening and the Institute of Civil Engineer’s Grad-a-Grad events. We run talks from a number of guest speakers, including Bristol’s own researchers, and host a handful of site visits every year. In the past, we’ve been to some of the largest and most prominent projects in the region, including the Hinkley Point C power station and the Eden Project.

Where do we do it? 

We’ve travelled as far as London for site visits in the past, but often we try to keep site visits within the South West region. We hold most of our departmental and professional events as well as our Annual General Meeting in the Queen’s Building as it is easily accessible. Our family socials are usually at the head of the family’s house but we also use the Balloon Bar for karaoke, Racks in Clifton for the summer BBQ and the White Harte for the Skanska pub quiz.

What have we achieved and how have we met the standards of the Gold Award?

The work towards achieving the Gold Award started from handover, over 2 years ago. Right after this meeting, we sought to engage with the department to understand how we can create the best possible experience for all our members. Next, we set out a number of tasks each committee to complete over the Summer, preparing us for the upcoming year. These included arranging a social schedule, isolating places we wanted to go for site visits, scheduling events with our industry contacts, and preparing sponsorship packages to ensure we have enough money for every thing we do! We have always found that preparing a diverse range of events well in advance, ensuring all of our members feel welcome and celebrating engineering excellence has made it possible to achieve the Gold Award standard.

Anything different we’re planning for next year?

We’re hoping to broaden our appeal with new ideas for social events, including evenings spent with a smaller group – using our family system – and more sport-based activities. This includes an initiative to start a faculty-wide Engineering Varsity series to socialise with students from other departments, including Electrical and Mechanical. We also want to deepen our cooperation with the university organising more lectures and networking events.

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More information

Find out more about Societies and Clubs

Find out more about the Balloon Accreditation Scheme