So these were personal notes I wrote for the YH facebook group:
"Before I forget, I wanted to scribble down some personal thoughts from this year's final. This will be a bit of a stream-of-consciousness thing, but bear with me...
This was our seventh final, and although we've never had a bad one, this was one of the best. I think we're getting better at running them. This year, the challenge went as smoothly as we could hope for. Great venue. Nicky Puckey did a fantastic job of basically running everything that wasn't directly related to the challenge while Andy Moore wrote a brilliant challenge that the other sub-challenges could hang off. Both of them put in a lot of work.
I was completely exhausted by the end, so god knows what the rest of you were feeling. All I had to do was judge and announce the winners.
That said, deciding on the winner was the hardest decision we've ever had in judging YH. It took ages to separate the final three. So well done Amy Leverson, but also Annie Cobbold and Alex Donnelly, because you two were very, very close.
On a personal level, I'm really pleased with my pair of Best Future Digital Marketers. The perfect digital marketer would be a combination of Francesca Jacks and Gemma Kerr. Since it's not possible to merge them into a single person, they both had to win. Gemma more than anyone else got the importance of using maths to work out the best forms of advertising (i.e. the most cost-effective and the best reach). Francesca I think had more creative ideas than anyone else in the entire competition.
You lot are easily the most multi-talented bunch of finalists we've ever had. I'll repeat what I said earlier today - even for those of you aiming for exotic artistic careers, the skills you've shown over the last two days show that you should have a good fallback.
This isn't why she came in the top three, but Alex Donnelly did make a good first impression when the first thing she said to me was "I love your moustache!".
We didn't give out style points, but if we did, then Grace Allum would get some for that jumpsuit.
It's great to see younger brothers and sisters of previous finalists. We had two this year - Annie Cobbold and David Bramwell. It's even better when, in the case of Annie, she does ever so slightly better than her big brother...Harry Cobbold.
In an ideal world, we'd have even longer to run the final so that we could get to know you all better. Occasionally after friending someone on Facebook I see some interesting detail. For example, Mikey Major I see comes from Ellesmere Port. That's (almost) my part of the world. I was born and grew up in Wrexham and before we moved to Cornwall, we lived in Mickle Trafford.
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"Before I forget, I wanted to scribble down some personal thoughts from this year's final. This will be a bit of a stream-of-consciousness thing, but bear with me...
This was our seventh final, and although we've never had a bad one, this was one of the best. I think we're getting better at running them. This year, the challenge went as smoothly as we could hope for. Great venue. Nicky Puckey did a fantastic job of basically running everything that wasn't directly related to the challenge while Andy Moore wrote a brilliant challenge that the other sub-challenges could hang off. Both of them put in a lot of work.
I was completely exhausted by the end, so god knows what the rest of you were feeling. All I had to do was judge and announce the winners.
That said, deciding on the winner was the hardest decision we've ever had in judging YH. It took ages to separate the final three. So well done Amy Leverson, but also Annie Cobbold and Alex Donnelly, because you two were very, very close.
On a personal level, I'm really pleased with my pair of Best Future Digital Marketers. The perfect digital marketer would be a combination of Francesca Jacks and Gemma Kerr. Since it's not possible to merge them into a single person, they both had to win. Gemma more than anyone else got the importance of using maths to work out the best forms of advertising (i.e. the most cost-effective and the best reach). Francesca I think had more creative ideas than anyone else in the entire competition.
You lot are easily the most multi-talented bunch of finalists we've ever had. I'll repeat what I said earlier today - even for those of you aiming for exotic artistic careers, the skills you've shown over the last two days show that you should have a good fallback.
This isn't why she came in the top three, but Alex Donnelly did make a good first impression when the first thing she said to me was "I love your moustache!".
We didn't give out style points, but if we did, then Grace Allum would get some for that jumpsuit.
It's great to see younger brothers and sisters of previous finalists. We had two this year - Annie Cobbold and David Bramwell. It's even better when, in the case of Annie, she does ever so slightly better than her big brother...Harry Cobbold.
In an ideal world, we'd have even longer to run the final so that we could get to know you all better. Occasionally after friending someone on Facebook I see some interesting detail. For example, Mikey Major I see comes from Ellesmere Port. That's (almost) my part of the world. I was born and grew up in Wrexham and before we moved to Cornwall, we lived in Mickle Trafford.