The Scottish Innovative Student Award (SISA) is a three-tier Award, offered nationally by the Scottish Institute for Enterprise (SIE). The Award recognises students’ high-level skills development within existing academic courses (Stage 1), as well as providing an opportunity for students to build on these skills through participating in a national one-day, multi-disciplinary team workshop (Stage 2) and an online entrepreneurship assessment (Stage 3).
The initiative enables students to develop employability competencies, such as creative problem solving, communication and collaborative working; assisting students to develop attributes and skills for the ever-changing employment landscape. This self-paced Award is open to both undergraduates and taught postgraduates; enabling students to complete it as their schedule allows. Sofiya Cox, a Politics and International Relations student completed the first stage of SISA as part of the accredited course, Dirty War and Its Aftermath PI4577. Followed by stage two of the Award at the national SISA workshop, hosted in Dundee by SIE. The one-day event had a practical focus on the United Nations, 13th Sustainable Development Goal, Climate Action and introduced innovation methodologies to develop potential solutions and drive change. The value of participating in this multi-disciplinary team workshop is highlighted in Sofiya’s comment:
"I thought it would be an interesting way to meet people from other fields, and learn from their experiences, whilst understanding the mechanics of bringing an idea to life."