UPEI business student awarded prestigious Frank H. Sobey Award

Graham Watts, a fourth -year student in the School of Business at the University of Prince Edward Island, has won a prestigious Frank H. Sobey Award for Excellence in Business.

A native of Montague, Watts is one of only six university students in Atlantic Canada to receive this honour. Other winners are from the University of New Brunswick, Dalhousie University, Saint Mary's University, Cape Breton University and Mount Allison University.

The award, which is valued at $10,000, recognizes business students who have excelled academically and demonstrated a commitment to extracurricular and community activities.

'We are very pleased that Graham has won the Sobey Award for 2008/09,' says Dr. Don Wagner, acting dean of the School of Business. 'He has a very entrepreneurial spirit, and he performs extremely well in his academic courses. He is exactly the sort of person the Sobey Award was designed to recognize. We know this competition attracts applications from many outstanding students from across the region, and winning this award is a terrific achievement.'

A full-time student at UPEI, Watts is very pleased to be a recipient of the Frank H. Sobey Award for Excellence in Business.

"The Frank H. Sobey Award is a prestigious award created by an extremely successful businessman,' says Watts. 'It is an honour to receive this award, and I hope it will help to further enable me to meet my own business aspirations in the future.'

Currently he is working as marketing coordinator for Island Abbey Foods, a young and emerging P.E.I. specialty food company. The company was named a Top 10 Innovator for 2008 by Food In Canada magazine for its honey drops, individual drops made from 100 per cent pure dried honey that can be used to sweeten tea and coffee.

Watts is founder and owner of Nature Trails, a company that manufactures walking sticks, twig pencils, bird houses, bat boxes, bird feeders, and wooden pens. He started his business in 1999 at the age of 12, and has since expanded into the production of other wood products. He has also branched out into forest management with the purchase of 178 acres of woodland.

For his entrepreneurial spirit, he was named the 2008 Prince Edward Island Student Entrepreneur Champion by the national charitable organization, Advancing Canadian Entrepreneurship (ACE).

In 2008 he also received the Harry MacLauchlan Memorial Award in Entrepreneurship and the H. Wade MacLauchlan Scholarship. He was a member of a fourth-year business student team that recently won a competition to develop a business strategy for a local company.

Watts and the other award winners, along with the deans of their respective business schools, were formally recognized at a special presentation held on March 6 at Crombie House, home of the late Frank H. Sobey, in Abercrombie, Nova Scotia. The events was attended by members of the Sobey family, and the boards of directors of the Sobey and Empire corporations.

Each year, the Frank H. Sobey Awards for Excellence in Business Studies presents six awards of $10,000 each. All full-time business students attending Atlantic universities are eligible for consideration. Deans of Business at each university are asked to nominate candidates - based on academic standing, entrepreneurial interest, extracurricular and community activities, employment history, and career aspirations.

Since the Frank H. Sobey Awards for Excellence in Business Studies were established in 1989, more than $700,000 has been awarded to business students in the four Atlantic provinces. Every university in the region that offers a business program has had more than one recipient of a Frank H. Sobey Award.