The toast of Commerce

The Faculty of Commerce has feted the top students from its 2004 classes. The faculty - in the form of dean Professor Doug Pitt and deputy dean Professor John Simpson - handed over class medals to the pacesetters from its more than 140 under- and postgraduate courses at a recent gathering. Before that, though, they also presented a dozen-and-a-half corporate awards, with some handsome purses, sponsored by, among others, Accenture, the Actuarial Society of South Africa, Butterworths, BSG, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, Foschini, KPMG, Cycad Finance Holdings, the Marketing Federation of South Africa, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Standard Bank, the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants, Unilever and Viadata. The big winner among the students was the absent Cailin McGurk, who was named for five corporate awards - totalling more than R4 000 in prize money - and seven class medals. Nalen Naidoo took home the largest catch of the evening, though, the R6 000 awarded by the Actuarial Society of South Africa for the best honours project in actuarial science by a student at a South African university.