Profile

I love trying new types of food I like to visit new restaurants and make it a rule for myself to try not to visit the same restaurant twice so I can discover new places. I am lucky to have a job that allows me to do this and as well as travel now countries. So far since the start of last year, I’ve been to America, Portugal, Hamburg, London, Denmark and many more through work or speaking at tech conferences.

A little fun fact about me is I’ve never been in the same school for more than three years because my parents used to move around a lot for their jobs. College is the longest time I’ve been in one place which was four years. I wouldn’t change this for even a sticky toffee pudding because it really helped me make some cool friends around the whole who I know can call up and visit whenever I want and because of this I put myself out there making new friends and became a quick learner since everywhere I went teachers taught new subjects in different ways.

When I was studying engineering in college I used to represent my college in boxing tournaments. I used to train twice a day during competition season which around 5/6 months of the academic year and during most summers. This was a great outlet for me to destress and get my mind of everything, I stopped boxing after college but it’s my new year’s resolution to take up boxing again.

I work as an IoT Engineer and developer in the biggest consulting firm in the world at the heart of the Dublin Docklands. I work with novel technology mostly like Blockchain which basically means something working on new and young technology that it’s never been used or even thought of before. I like to call myself a full-time problem-solver, the exciting part of my job is that I get to really come up with new ideas and ways to complete tasks that have never been done before the sky is only the limit!

One of the reasons I choose to do engineering is because its soo broad you can go into many different industries with engineering like making artificial limbs, kidneys hearts which can save peoples lives, become a developer who can develop apps, video-games and make some cutting edge websites or even a mechanical engineer who get to design and build cars, aeroplanes or new forms of transports. That’s just a little taste of what engineering can take you, consultant, producer, finance and business are amongst the careers you’d be able to achieve. Apart from the career aspects engineering has taught me to be more practical in my personal life like automating my apartment, making some life long friends in college who go out together and travel together and being able to develop my own ideas at the comfort of my home.

During the last year of my college, I got to take part in team Eirloop as the lead software architect which was the first team to represent Ireland in the world finals of the SpaceX Hyperloop Competition in California by building a new mode of transport called the Hyperloop an idea envisioned by Elon Musk. Last year, 2018, was the first year the Irish team applied and got through to the finals consisting of the top 20 universities around the world out of over 7,000 university entries SpaceX has received. 

Dubbed as the “Olympics of Engineering” our team places 5th in the world as well as winning an award for Innovation. Team Éirloop is on a mission to show the world that Ireland is amongst the leaders in innovation, engineering and technology. They have made it to the top 20 finals again this year, last year we were in awe we made the finals and in less than 10 weeks we had to scramble for sponsors to help fund equipment, machinery and travel cost to help us make it to California. This year the team is more proactive about the build and gathering enough sponsors to help the team build the fifth mode of transport, the Hyperloop, a pod travelling in a vacuum tube at the speed of sound which is around 1,200 km/hr. We broke the record last year for having the fastest subtrack run in SpaceX history and this year the team is hoping to do even better.

I wish to donate this money to project Éirloop which is a 100% student lead project which they will use to buy equipment and machinery they need to build the Hyperloop pod. From being a member of the team last year I know how hard we’ve worked to ensure we make Ireland proud and the long hours and stress during the last few months coming up to the competition. If I was chosen as the winner I would use it to help the team reach new heights and to make sure the Éirloop project keeps running year after year so maybe by the time some of you reach college you’d be able to take part and go to California to participate in the competition at SpaceX.