Humanities student recognised by Undergraduate Awards Global Summit in Education category which is commonly referred to as the 'Junior Nobel Prize'
The Undergraduate Awards (UA) gathered 150 of the world’s top undergraduate students in Dublin for the 2016 UA Global Summit, including one student from South East Technological University (WIT).
Cited as the ultimate champion of high-potential undergraduates, and often referred to as a “junior Nobel Prize”, The Undergraduate Awards is the world’s largest international academic awards programme, recognising excellent research and original work across the sciences, humanities, business and creative arts.
The winning student from SETU was Katie Duggan in the category of Social Sciences: Social Policy for her work assessing the value and limitations of Irish policy, legislation and practice from a children's rights perspective. Katie was named as the Regional Winner for the Island of Ireland.
Katie was also highly commended in the Education category for an essay that she wrote in her second year at SETU on the historical trajectory of discovery learning in light of modern empirical findings. Fellow student Abbygail Wood was also highly commended for the category of Literature: English.
Katie, who hopes to be a primary school teacher in the future said, “I was delighted to be both highly commended and a regional winner this year as being a regional winner meant that I was able to attend the UA Global Summit in Dublin. I was highly commended last year but couldn't obtain the funding to attend the summit and I thought that I had missed my chance. To be recognised by UA for the second year in a row and in two categories this time also felt amazing.”
The Undergraduate Awards received a record number of submissions in the 2016 programme, totaling a massive 5,514 papers from undergraduates in 244 institutions and 121 nationalities. In each category, the Global Winner is the highest-performing paper overall and also within each category the Regional Winner is the highest performing Highly Commended paper from their region. Highly Commended Entrants are those who were ranked in the top 10% of submissions in each category.
In total, 58 different universities and 37 different nationalities were represented at the UA Global Summit this year. Ryerson University, Canada; Stanford University, USA; University of Johannesburg, South Africa and the University of Helsinki, Finland were among the institutions represented at the event.
The students received their medals and certificates at the UA Global Summit and were addressed by keynote speaker Dr. Mae Jemison, NASA Astronaut. Pertinent to last week, Dr. Jemison addressed the students saying “Yikes. What have we been doing? We look at what's been happening in the world, and people say things will just turn out... Good things just don't happen, things don't always turn out, they require work. As our future industry-leaders and CEOs, we are counting on you.”
Speaking about this year’s Winners and Highly Commended Entrants, CEO of The Undergraduate Awards Louise Hodgson said “This is a huge achievement for South East Technological University and its students. UA received the highest number of submissions to date with only the best papers making it through the judging process - the competition was extremely tough and the Judges were astounded at the high quality of undergraduate research in the programme this year. Congratulations to this year’s successful entrants”.
The UA Global Summit took place last week (November 8th-11th) in Dublin across several beautiful venues including Farmleigh House, St. Patrick’s Cathedral and City Hall, Dublin.