Bright sparks to make Dublin summit a 'Davos for students'

“Online courses allow tens of thousands of people to learn the same subject together. In a classroom, often the bigger the class, the less you get out of it, and the less attention you get from professors. The same doesn’t go for online courses as people help each other out more.”

The company’s goal is to build a digital infrastructure to improve the learning and teaching experience by allowing students and faculty to easily collaborate with each other, carry out research, create events, discuss course materials and share files.

Kane Sarhan, a 24 -year-old co-founder of Enstitute, will address students at the conference on Making your own adventure: something from nothing.

Dividing his college life between class and a part-time job, Sarhan discovered the skills he learned in the lecture hall rarely applied in the boardroom. He also believed the university model wasn’t working for many young graduates, who were finding themselves unemployed or working in low-paid jobs. Thus the idea for Enstitute, an apprentice programme designed to immerse aspiring professionals in the New York start-up scene was born.

The two-year apprenticeship programme provides young adults with an alternative to college, as the skills necessary to survive the current business climate cannot always be learned in the classroom, says Sarhan. The first class of fellows, whittled down from more than 500 applicants, began the course in September.

The UA Summit will culminate with the Undergraduate Awards, which recognise the world’s best student research projects.

More than 2,890 submissions were received from students across Europe and North America, for which 180 judges spent two months assessing.

The battle of the brains will draw to a close on November 9th when the overall winner in each academic category will be awarded by President Michael D Higgins at the Undergraduate Awards ceremony.

Undergraduate Awards

* The brainchild of Paddy Cosgrave (Web Summit, F.ounders) and Oisín Hanrahan (HandyBook), the Undergraduate Awards recognise outstanding undergraduate research by the world’s top students

* Award categories cover the A-Z of academic disciplines, representing leading-edge undergraduate course work

* Final-year students from across the world were invited to submit projects completed as part of their coursework that received a high 2.1 or higher grade

* Thirty-nine students, including 21 Irish, have been selected as winners from nearly 3,000 global applications

* Winning entrants include students from TCD, McGill University, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, University of Cambridge, St Andrew’s University and University of Edinburgh who bagged wins with research topics as diverse as “gene silencing” to “contagion in the euro zone sovereign debt crisis”

* The prizegiving for winners in each category will take place this Friday