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Behind the scenes: Alexis Lyon-Sinclair

Our Open Days are a chance for thousands of visitors to get a taste of what it's like to live and study at Warwick.

Find out what's involved from the people who help to make it all happen.

Bread Oven team Alexis with two of her team

Alexis Lyon-Sinclair

Catering manager, Food and Beverage, Warwick Students' Union
Role for Open Days: Catering, Bread Oven and Curiositea

My usual job involves...

On Open Day I get to work at 7am to freshly bake and slice all of the baguettes, prepare all the fillings and chop all the salad. Throughout the morning more staff join me so that eventually there are 4-5 staff helping.

The rest of the year I spend more time developing the offers in my outlets, such as creating the specials which are served
in Curiositea and in the Bread Oven, which I really enjoy.

At Open Days my job is...

managing my team who freshly prepare and serve over 600 baguettes and lunches for the many Open Day visitors.

We also prepare 400 'meal deals' for all of the University staff that are working on the day. We make everything fresh - catering for dietary requirements - and load it all onto vans and deliver it to them.

I also run Curiositea, where we will serve around 600 cups of tea and coffee, and 350 pieces of cake. So I spend the entire day running between the two, changing stock around and if needed moving staff.

What I enjoy the most about Open Days is...

the scale of the event! It's such a massive operation it requires a lot of teamwork. It needs everyone to be super organised and brings us all together, so when we're prepping the food beforehand there's a great atmosphere and you can have a good laugh.

We get lots of really nice feedback from visitors and staff. It's great to know that the staff enjoy their lunches!

Open Days are special because...

They're absolute mayhem! Its non-stop and I run around like a lunatic, but because I have such a good team and everyone is always really busy, at the end of the day you have a real feeling of achievement. I think that it's because of this great team ethos that most of the time everything runs smoothly!

For us it's also a huge change. The summer is very quiet and then we go straight into the busiest day of the year - you need to shift gear instantly.

If I could change anything about Open Days it would be...

I would make Curiositea and the Bread Oven bigger!

Not everyone knows that...

One an average open day we get through 20kg of tuna, 25kg of chicken and 1,200 baguettes.

My top tips for our visitors

Our baguettes are definitely worth the queue!


Enjoyed hearing from Alexis? Read more from some of our other volunteers