August 14, 2013, by Nottingham Advantage Award

Mathew Liasis Wins Barclays Leadership Prize

In July of 2013, Mathew Liasis graduated from the University of Nottingham with a BA Hons Finance, Accounting, and Management. With him, Mathew also took the experiences he gained through the Nottingham Advantage Award program. To meet the 30 credit requirement, Mathew chose to enrol in the Business School Employer Program Certificate, Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), and International Summer School in China modules.

Each student who completes the Advantage Award is eligible to apply for various employer supported prizes. Having successfully completed the program, Mathew was particularly interested in the Barclays Leadership Prize because it offered the opportunity to further develop his business skills by going on an 8-week Barclays internship in Canary Wharf.

Here is what Mathew had to say about winning the Global Graduate Prize:

“I believe I brought to the competition a natural enthusiasm for all the activities I took part in. What I think set me apart was my engagement in the Summer Study Abroad programme in China in my second year. This experience highlighted my motivation for a challenge and openness to leadership in international teams. In terms of the interview process, I put significant emphasis on how I wanted to begin and progress my professional career in finance at Barclays and provided relevant examples of how the NAA activities informed my career aspirations.

As an intern at Barclays, I found the exposure to senior leaders was fantastic. One of the highlights for me was in the second week when the Barclays CEO, Antony Jenkins, came in to talk with us and answer questions about the company’s TRANSFORM programme and ambitions to become the ‘Go-To’ Bank. This contact with senior leaders was invaluable to learning more about individual leadership styles and retrospectively a lot about my own.

The commercial awareness I have built through the internship has also been very useful. Especially with Barclays recent announcement of a £5.8bn rights issue and £2bn of CoCos to meet the PRA’s capital requirements, I have discovered why these exact quantities of cash must be raised by helping to prepare Barclays weekly leveraged balance sheet. In the future, I would love to continue working in the Banking industry, especially at Barclays, and complete the ACA qualification.

The NAA is clearly a very highly valued award and the prize sponsorship by international corporations highlights the significance of its completion. I could not more highly recommend completing the NAA to another student. The variety of modules available is incredible and I would encourage those on the award to consider how the modules they do will be useful to their future career choices.”

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