Four Cork Institute of Technology students have taken part in the prestigious Innovact Conference in Rheims, France, writes Dick Ahlstrom
There is something special about the mechanical engineering bachelors degree programme at Cork Institute of Technology. Its students have captured an amazing array of national and international awards for the quality of their work.
Such is CIT's profile that last week a team attended the European Young Entrepreneurs Conference in Reims, France. While they didn't win one of the coveted prizes, their invitation to the event was of great significance.
Only 26 projects from across Europe were selected to go forward to the competition out of a possible 320 projects. And the CIT undergraduates were up against PhD and post-doctoral research students.
The four participants, team leader Kathleen Hurley, and Claire Murphy, Lucy Gleeson and Martina Brennan, based their project on the design, manufacture and marketing of a device to immobilise a broken finger.
Their "Finger Fit" device provides the same level of immobilisation of the injured area as a conventional plaster cast. Yet it is far less restricting and annoying than the wrist-to-elbow cast universally employed by doctors now.
Their project had already won first place in the Siemens Engineers Ireland best Irish engineering degree project earlier this year.
This award scheme is open to engineering students from institutes and universities anywhere on the island of Ireland. Remarkably, CIT has won this prestigious award for the past four years running.
In fact the Institute has won dozens of other national and international awards over the past 15 years, says senior lecturer in CIT's mechanical engineering department, Sean F O'Leary. These include several HP Invent Awards, two Queen's Silver Jubilee Awards, Enterprise Ireland "Speak Out" competitions, a Genius Award for best new invention at the Nuremberg Inventors' Fair and many others.
There are 50 accredited mechanical engineering degree programmes here that can participate in these competitions, says O'Leary. "To win the Siemens Engineers Ireland award once would be a great achievement, but to win it four times in a row is unprecedented," he says.
So what is going on down at CIT that enables them to perform so well in these competitions? O'Leary puts it down to the calibre of students entering its level eight degree programme and also the design of the course itself.
"We have a very strong design core in all four years of the course," he says. Another reason is the structures set up to guide students through the entry and preparation for the competitions, he believes.
This includes the engineering aspects of design and prototyping, but a strong emphasis is also put on the commercial evaluation of the project and development of a strong business plan.
The winning team from CIT in the Siemens competition is typical of this. Kathleen Hurley was the engineering student who devised and designed the splint device while all the related business aspects were handled by business students, Claire, Lucy and Martina.
This blend of engineering and business is key, O'Leary believes. "I think it is the integrated structure of the programme that is important."
Approximating the real world in the work done by the mech-eng students is central to the design of the course, he says. The students study engineering but they also make regular presentations as part of the programme.
"A huge element of what we are involved in is teamwork and communications. It is really how a development team would work in industry," he says.
He also points to CIT's long tradition in technological education. The Institutes grew out of the Regional Technical Colleges set up in the 1970s, but in CIT's case the RTC came from the Crawford Municipal Technical Institute.
This in turn evolved from the much older Royal Cork Institution, set up as far back as 1803 to provide technical education.
Thus CIT has a 200-year tradition of providing technical education, argues O'Leary.