Two WIT computing students win Sun life Awards
Sun Life Financial (SLF) and Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) continue to celebrate their long running professional relationship with the recent announcement of the winners of the Sun Life Enterprise & Innovation Awards to students in the Department of Computing, Mathematics and Physics (CMP) at WIT.
Sarj Sidhu, Vice President of Technology Services, Sun Life Financial, United States, presented the winner in each category with a prize of €1,000. The Innovation Award for the project that demonstrated uniqueness went to Adrian Lowney from Ferrybank, Co Wexford for a remote USB storage manager, to help people who forget to bring memory devices home at the end of the working day, and the Enterprise Award for the project that demonstrated commercial potential went to Stephen Walsh from Tramore, Co Waterford for his mobile Audio Guides for museums, an idea he came up with while on holiday in Paris.
Sun Life has a long standing relationship with WIT, with one third of the workforce studying undergraduate or postgraduate courses at the Institute during their career and, through the awards programme, Sun Life promotes enterprise and innovation amongst WIT degree students across a range of computing courses.
Commenting at the ceremony, Mrs Sidhu said, “It is really important for Sun Life to maintain and develop our links with colleges such at WIT. The level of innovation I have seen here today is outstanding and it’s only through innovation and ideas generation that the global economy can recover. I would like to congratulate WIT for the quality of students and projects we have seen here today and reiterate our commitment to nurture this type of innovation at the Institute.”
25 projects were submitted from a pool of final year Honours undergraduate projects and 9 finalists were invited to showcase their projects at a ceremony held at Sun Life’s Head Office in Waterford.
The exhibition was followed by the award ceremony which was attended by the Mayor of Waterford Metropolitan District, Lola O’Sullivan; students and lecturers from WIT as well as Sun Life employees.
Lola O’Sullivan, in her first official engagement as Mayor, commented on the importance of the links between industry and education in the region and Karen Burns, General Manager, Sun Life Waterford remarked on the standard and quality of the projects, describing them as ‘outstanding’.
The successful finalists were: Cheryl Baldwin (Waterford), Adam Conroy (Wexford), Bríd Mackey (Kilkenny), Jonathan O'Brien (Kerry), John Kiely (Waterford), Stephen Walsh (Waterford), Adrian Lowney (Wexford), Cionnat Breathnach (Waterford) and John McDonnell (Kilkenny).
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