At school I was deputy president of the German Society and we decided to raise money for charity by organising a Christmas Ball. This had been done the year before and was a huge success, so at our events meeting I told the group I thought it would be a good idea to repeat it. Several other people in the group did not want to do this, but I was able to influence them that it was a good idea. We started planning in October 2006. We had to make sure that the venue was local because otherwise the cost of the taxi fare would have put people off. We had trouble finding a venue as most were already booked, but we finally found one. We decided to hire the hotel DJ for the music and agreed the menus for the meal. We had the tickets printed to avoid anyone photocopying them, but this caused a delay and meant that we couldn't start selling them until the end of November. Selling the tickets was a lot of work - we had to spend time staffing the ticket desk and going round lectures to promote the ball. Some of the group dropped out because of the pressure of work, which meant that it was up to me and the president to pull this off, or we would lose our deposit and have to cancel the ball. We decided to join up with the Spanish Society and make it a "Modern Languages Christmas Ball", and we sold all the tickets. It was a great night, we raised over £800 (quite a lot by persuading people to buy raffle tickets on the night), and I know that the hard work I put in made it happen. We gave the money we had raised to the RNIB.