Suzanne, who studied Fashion and Textile design at Somerset College, was selected as a finalist for the 6th FAD Competition. She says, "The Competition is a fantastic opportunity - it's fantastic to get your work seen by the industry. It's a brilliant opportunity to get experience about putting on fashion shows' and it's really exciting!

The brief for me was really interesting - it's really good to get students interested in other cultures and draw influences from that. It was really interesting to research and to inspire our textile and fashion ideas."

During summer 2006, Suzanne volunteered as a Workshop Assistant at Fashion Futures 1. "I found it really rewarding. It's great to see the students just excel, really. They come here, some of them not very confident, and by the end of the week they've really achieved something and that makes you feel great at the end of the day, to have been able to help them.

I think FAD is a great organisation to be promoting fashion and careers in fashion to young people. A lot of them don't really realise what it involves and I think during these workshops they really understand what it involves, how hard it is to get into and the sort of skills they'll need."