MDS students finish 2016 with a Google takeover; 4 MDS teams make Google Student Axis shortlist

After a final round of judging the shortlist for Google Student Axis is out, and all four finalist places have been taken out by MDS teams.

Congratulations to Jacob Newton, Connyr Agita, Gal Stern, Jinah Song, Merino Mariner, Hamish Cullen, Lauren Day and Nathaniel Ong. A big thank you to Natasha Stitchbury at CAANZ for organizing the competition and a ten-minute standing ovation for our tireless judges: Toby Talbot from Assignment, Haydn Kerr from DDB and Rueben Halper from Google. Despite being very busy people, the judges generously donated their time to go through over 50 entries from Otago University, AUT and Media Design School. After choosing a longlist of 10 MDS and AUT ideas, the judges met each team to give them feedback on their ideas and, this week, met them all again for the final presentations.

Says Kate Humphries, AdSchool: “We appreciate that tight budgets and deadlines make it very hard for industry to take time out of their jam-packed schedules to champion and inspire the next generation but when industry people do gift us their time it really puts students’ learning on steroids. So thank you, not only to Toby, Reuben, and Haydn, but also a sincere thanks to all the industry guests, panelists, mentors and judges who have helped us out this year. It’s been just over a week since our end of year show and almost all the teams are taken-and those that haven’t yet been snatched up, are about to be – because they’ve not only received offers, they’ve also got more interviews lined up next week both here and in Australia.  On the subject of our end-of-year show (pictured here) we’d also like to raise a glass of NZQA-approved-beverage to everyone who braved the torrential rain, thunderbolts and lighting to come along – I only wish I’d thought to bring along towels.”