The inaugural TECS awards ceremony at the University of Limerick has recognised a high achieving group of future young creators. John Collison of Stripe, Patricia Scanlon of Soapbox Labs, Tom McCarty of Patch, UL President, Kirsten Mey and the ISE team of Stephen Kinsella and Tiziana Margaria were in UL to hand out the awards to the group of talented young students.
The TECS programme is a nationwide search for Ireland’s most talented students in technology, engineering, creativity and science.
TECS is run by the newly established Immersive Software Engineering (ISE) programme and Patch Summer Accelerator.
Pictured with John Collison of Stripe are TECS competition overall winners: 1st Abutalha Alam from Castletroy College Limerick, 2nd Emma Burgess from Dublin’s Wesley College and joint 3rd Jakub Golinski from Creagh College, Wexford, and Daniel McCarthy from Ashton School, Cork. Abultalha claimed first place prize of €2,000 & €1,000 for his school. Photo Conor McCabe
John Collison told RTE’s Cathy Halloran, Stripe is continuing to expand here in Ireland, with dual headquarter’s in both Dublin and San Francisco, but Dublin is the focus of the expansion of their international efforts.”Part of that is how we can invest in and encourage the next generation of software engineers and ‘Stripes’ as well. And that’s why we’re here in UL with the Immersive Software engineering programme because we want to continue to grow the tech ecosystem selfishly – it’s what we want at Stripe, but also it’s what everyone needs.”
Mr Collison added that there is a need for more software engineers, with tech companies “scouring the place” trying to find them and as a result more need to be trained.
“That’s why we’ve been partnering with 50 other residency partners here at the ISM so that people can ‘learn by doing’ – partnering their skills and ideas with real world industry and moving outside the purely theoretical and traditional construct of learning,” he claimed.
“I think we could have the best computer science programme here in Europe, bar none, and that’s the goal of the team here at UL and I think they have a really good plan to do that.”
Video via RTE news and Cathy Halloran
