Nick Levens
BA(Hons) International Hospitality Management, 1995
My time in Eastbourne defined my adult life; I met my wife, made lifelong friends, learnt skills that I use daily in my business life over a decade after graduating and also picked up some invaluable life experiences along the way.
I arrived in Eastbourne in September 1992 as a seriously over-confident eighteen year-old, via teenage years spent working in various seaside cafes and bars and a Summer working in St. Emilion, France that had confirmed my career path would lie in hospitality. I was very fortunate to be part of an intake of highly individual, talented, outgoing people from a very wide range of backgrounds-there were very few shrinking violets in my year! This environment made me feel very comfortable and I certainly do not recall any significant issues settling into student life.
I had always viewed the course content itself as an umbrella education into which I could inject some specialist knowledge post-graduation via employers. There were certainly some aspects of the course which I greatly enjoyed and some that I struggled to motivate myself for, however I always retained a “big picture” outlook on the course content itself and immersed myself into every aspect of the academic course.
Where I really derived benefit from my time in Eastbourne was in the broader opportunities offered to students that gave me tremendous life experience; These opportunities included work trips to the Middle East and an ERASMUS exchange programme to Perpignan, France to spend three months studying at a foreign university. I also enjoyed working for large contract caterers at the big sporting events. These experiences all played an enormous part in my University career and added extra value to my “education” at Eastbourne.
Immediately post graduation I spent the summer working the big sporting events (and paying off my student debts) before joining a large International themed-restaurant company and moving to Paris. This lasted a couple of years followed by a brief stint in Germany before returning to the UK to begin a career setting up business for a variety of large and small investors in the London bar, restaurant and café scene. This invaluable experience “making my mistakes on somebody else’s money” was a somewhat unconventional career path, however the disciplines learnt at Eastbourne combined with the post graduate training I had received in Paris (and that unshakeable over-confidence I’d retained from my teenage years) meant that I learnt a phenomenal amount about building businesses and also built up an Industry contact base I retain today.
Having spent four years at the sharp end of entrepreneurial life I was then approached to run the catering operation for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s theatre group. It was here that I met my future business partner-an outstanding chef/manager who had taken the City & Guilds route through qualification and spent twenty-odd years working in various hotels and conference venues worldwide.
We launched Life’s Kitchen Ltd at the beginning of 2005 ( www.lifeskitchen.com ) and now provide Catering and Event Management services to various venues and Livery Companies in the City of London. We have grown rapidly, investing profits into a central production unit and building a solid business in a really short period of time. We now stand ready to grow the business, and in turn the profitability, rapidly, and my business partner and I are really enjoying truly doing it for ourselves.
On a personal level, I married a fellow Eastbourne graduate (BA (Hons) International Hospitality Management 1991-5) in September 2002. Three of the ushers at my wedding were university mates and my wife and I still see a large number of university friends. Interestingly, my wife has followed an utterly different, predominantly corporate career path (and is currently studying for her MBA) having taken the same degree as me.
In conclusion, I would advise anyone considering Eastbourne as their destination to embrace the widest spectrum of opportunities university life has to offer. The financial commitment required to undertake a degree is immeasurably greater than it was when I was studying, whilst frankly graduate salaries in our industry have not increased by anything like a proportional amount. So think carefully about it, and once you have decided to study at Eastbourne, put absolutely everything you have into it-never in my opinion has the old saying “you only get out what you put in…” been more appropriate than in reference to university life at Eastbourne.
And finally, be very careful when you meet that pretty girl in the nightclub on the end of the pier-the pretty girl I met dumped me three times during our time at Eastbourne……and still married me seven years after we graduated!
