Irish engineering students win scholarship to ‘help save the planet’
DIT and SIRUS are delighted to introduce the inaugural SIRUS Scholarship in Building Engineering 2017.
The Scholarship was a initiative created with James Byrne, a DIT graduate and Frank Caul, the pair who set up the very successful Irish engineering company SIRUS Group.
“SIRUS are always looking for good people”, says Frank Caul, “we prefer to employ the graduates from Building Engineering in DIT as they are able to hit the ground running and contribute to the company quickly; this also means that these graduates climb the career ladder very quickly.”
The two talented students (pictured below) awarded this year’s SIRUS Scholarship are Zoe Elliott and Pauric O’Connell, both fourth year students of Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) in Building Engineering.
DIT’s Bachelor of Engineering in Building Engineering is a unique course of its kind in Ireland and there are not enough students to meet strong industry demand.
Ciara Ahern, the Head of Building Engineering in DIT says that “the buildings in which we spend 90% of our time are responsible for about half of global energy use. Ireland urgently needs Building Engineers to help meet recruitment demand as we scale up for the climate change targets for our built environment.”
Frank Caul, MD of SIRUS, Zoe Elliott, Pauric O’Connell and James Byrne, CEO SIRUS and DIT Graduate
James Byrne, CEO of Sirus is himself an excellent example of this open access approach, starting off his career as an apprentice plumber in DIT.
“This is why we set up the scholarship based on the attributes of grit and perseverance rather than academic merit” says James Byrne, “and the end of the day it is a stick-with-it attitude that gets you through tough times in education, business and in life in general.”
SIRUS also generously donated a state-of-the-art recirculating air conditioning teaching system to the college which will be put into use for the next academic year.
Eileen Carey, James Byrne, Frank Caul, Brian Clare, Ciara Ahern and students Zoe Elliott & Pauric O’Connell with the Air Conditioning Rig donated by SIRUS
