Agricommerce student Maddison Carrick was recently awarded the prize, given for meritorious performance in farm management papers and demonstrating a high level of personal integrity, intellectual curiosity, vision and social conscience, by farm and agribusiness management professor Nicola Shadbolt.
Three students were shortlisted for the award based on their grades, before being interviewed to find the overall winner.
Shadbolt says the shortlist contained three outstanding students but Carrick performed exceptionally well during the course of her degree.
“Maddison has an exciting vision for the future of agriculture,” Shadbolt said.
“She always goes the extra mile to assist her peers and others … has an intellectual curiosity that has led to an internship and more importantly, an offer of employment already.
“She has also undertaken additional farm work to provide substance to her chosen career as a farm consultant.”
Carrick grew up on a south Taranaki calf-rearing operation run by her father near Waverley and says she has long been interested in a career with a farming focus.
As part of her degree, she also studied accounting and economics, and had an internship at Taranaki’s CMK Chartered Accountants during the summer holidays at the end of her first two years of study.
That led to a job with CMK, which she begins early next year, as a trainee accountant and farm consultant, with the company looking to establish a consulting arm as part of its business.
Initially, she will divide her time between accounting and farm consultancy work before deciding to either focus on one of the two roles, or continuing to divide her time between the two.
As part of her consultancy work, she hopes to help farmers adjust to the changing regulations that are currently being applied across their businesses.
During her first two years of study, Carrick was based in Palmerston North and there she gained practical farm management experience across deer, sheep and beef and dairy operations.
This year she studied extramurally from south Taranaki and was responsible for finding farm work-based experience herself, much of which was on sheep and beef farms.
Always interested in getting as wide a range of experience as possible, when Farmers Weekly caught up with her she had just finished a relief milking shift, despite having her final exam the following day.
Carrick says she is thankful for the support provided by scholarships from a number of businesses and trusts that helped meet the financial costs of her studies, including farm machinery supplier Norwoods, the Stratford Demonstration Farm Society, the L.A. Alexander Trust, the Bashford Nicholls Trust and the Massey Business School.
The William Gerrish Memorial Prize is in memory of the late Bill Gerrish, a distinguished former Massey student whose family set up the award.
