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Lincoln working to enrich New Zealand

10 May 2021 | Students News

Lincoln Roper is using the knowledge and skills he learned in his Bachelor of Agribusiness and Food Marketing degree to grow the nation’s prosperity.

He will be graduating on 14 May in the Christchurch Town Hall.

“I am now based in Auckland, working for KPMG Propagate, KPMG New Zealand's food, agribusiness and export advisory business. We are working to fuel New Zealand's prosperity by accelerating the competitiveness of the food and fibre sector.

“My studies allowed me to gain a comprehensive knowledge of agribusiness and food supply chains and the ability to pair these with the practical understandings that I had gained through my practical work requirements.

“The theories that I learned at Lincoln I often use in my day-to-day.”

He said Lincoln University was “a top pick for me, given the grassroots feel of the campus, the people and the opportunities it boasted”.

“The campus genuinely had a community feel, with club events giving opportunities to bond with fellow students. Lincoln University is small enough to care about each student, but big enough to provide leading education.”

He said the university also carried a certain prestige in the food and fibre sector, with many notable leaders coming from Lincoln.

“It was apparent to me that the modern world required leaders who had lived and breathed what they were doing, from being hands on right through to the governance level. Lincoln offered this, with the combination of teaching theory, as well as backing it up with practical work requirements. I knew that receiving a degree from Lincoln would carry real weight, given the rigours of having to complete the degree.”

Lincoln said he was deliberate in his desire to experience as many systems as he could during his studies.

“I filled in my summer holidays working on the Chatham Islands in sheep and beef, Mid Canterbury with arable and livestock production, Western Australia with broad acre cropping and most recently, an aquaculture sustainability project with Kono NZ.

“I also received a Prime Minister's Scholarship to tour around Indonesia, looking at how culture interacted with the food experience.”

Other highlights included winning the International Food Marketing Competition in 2020 (along with four fellow Lincoln University students), being the Third Year Future Leader Scholar of the Year for 2020, winning the 2020 Lincoln University Future Leader Project of the Year award, and receiving a Lincoln University Gold Award - Service Excellence honour.

The Future Leader programme helped him “develop the soft skills that wrapped around the theories that I was learning in my lectures”.

“It showed me the importance of having meaningful relationships with like-minded people and the importance of maintaining your personal brand.”

He said the scholarship’s development programme throughout the three years was priceless, enabling him to develop his own leadership philosophy of “never looking down on someone unless you're helping them up”.

“The weekly meetings gave rigour to my personal development. I have come to learn that setting aside three hours a week to work on yourself is so important. I have carried this routine on in my corporate journey, as I see it being so incredibly valuable.”