Meet our March Warwick Wonder...

We’re very excited to announce the winner of March’s Warwick Wonder award – WMG’s Magdalena Cieslak!

Here’s what you need to know: Wonders and Wows is a new awards scheme, designed to recognise staff for the brilliant work they do. Our February awards celebrated colleagues who’d set up a new furniture reuse scheme (Estates) and gone above and beyond to support students (Foundation Studies).

This time around, we had 168 nominations across the board – it was a hard job for Stuart Croft, our Vice-Chancellor, to select winners! He’ll be catching up with our Wow award winners soon, but he’s already surprised our March Wonder, Magdalena. Read on below to find out why Magdalena’s been recognised this time around.

Transcript

of our Wonders and Wows Awards to Magdalena Cieslak, who works on the Applied Engineering programme and does wonderful things to support our students in terms of outreach. And is apparently a wonderful colleague and we're just going to go in and give her an award.

Hello everybody, hello everybody. Some people know what's going on you've got a look of utter horror on your face. You see, good person, we have this wonderful process where we invite people to put forward the names of colleagues who do a wonderful job and you, I'm afraid there's no good looking around think you're going to get out because you're here, you have been nominated and we are going to make an award this morning to you for the wonderful work that you do on the AEP with students with your Outreach work and the most important thing in the nomination is apparently you're a wonderful colleague, is that so?

Now we've got the maximum embarrassment and discomfort, I can present to you, if I may thank you so much, first of all it's you first of all a certificate to mark this moment, secondly £2.22 or something like that anyway there's a little thing there, but I think most importantly the gong! Look at the gong, look at the gong and look at the gong isn't that marvelous it is a star for a star, for you well done! Thank you.

Warwick Wonders

The Warwick Wonders Award celebrates the people we’re proud to work with at our University. It recognises colleagues who’ve gone above and beyond to make a positive difference, enrich our community and demonstrate what we value.   

Magdalena Cieslak – WMG

Magdalena leads WMG’s Applied Engineering Professional Programme with passion. She actively collaborates with the Outreach and Marketing teams, participating in activities to promote university research and education. Magdalena goes out of her way to showcase Warwick to prospective candidates and inspire young people to pursue a career in STEM. She’s even taken on the role of an interactive demonstrator at a STEM connection project, held at Coventry’s Transport Museum!

Colleagues shared that Magdalena takes great care of her 123 students, 18 tutors and nine external industrial clients, with a balance of professionalism and empathy. She's always on the lookout to engage and inspire young people who might not otherwise have considered a career in STEM.

After she received the award, Magdalena commented:

"I am honoured to receive this award and would like to thank my colleagues at WMG for supporting me and making it possible.

I feel very passionate about widening participation in higher education (especially in STEM). My dream is to increase the number of young people entering higher education, and more specifically to increase the proportion of these students who are from underrepresented groups. By encouraging more people from diverse backgrounds to pursue higher education, I want to help ensure that everyone has an equal chance to succeed and contribute to society.

In my current role I am a course leader for the Applied Professional Engineering Programme. I also teach STEM-related subjects and participate in many outreach activities. By sharing my knowledge and passion for STEM, I hope to inspire others to pursue careers in these fields and contribute to the advancement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Receiving this award makes me feel appreciated. It will be my source of motivation to continue to make contributions to the University of Warwick community."

Share your support for Magdalena and the incredible work she does in the comments below!

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