2013 Press Releases

UCC students top the field

15 Oct 2013
Undergraduate Award winner Siobhán O’Connor (right) with Siobhan Murphy, lecturer in the School of Nursing & Midwifery at UCC (photo by Tony Archer, Chief Technical Officer, UCC). Jessica Kennedy also won an Undergraduate Award.

Two UCC students have been declared top of their field by prestigious international academic awards programme The Undergraduate Awards.

Jessica Kennedy from Dooradoyle, Co. Limerick and Siobhán O’Connor, from Kanturk, North Cork have been named as category winners in the island of Ireland programme of the Undergraduate Awards (UA) 2013. Ms. Kennedy won out in the Irish leg of the Social Innovation category. Ms. O’Connor won the Irish leg of the Nursing and Midwifery category, and also saw off stiff competition to win that category outright.*

Ms. Kennedy, who has just graduated from the Occupational Science & Occupational Therapy Department in UCC, won for her paper entitled ‘A Shift from Offline to Online: Adolescence, the Internet and Social Participation’. The offering from Siobhán O’Connor, a 4th year B.Sc. Nursing student in UCC, won both the Irish category for Nursing and the overall award for the category to boot. Her paper entitled ‘The scourge of chronic venous leg ulcers – is topical zinc the answer? A review of the literature’ will be published in the UA 2013 academic journal. Her essay joins 21 other contributions, selected from almost 4000 submissions in over 180 colleges and universities across 25 countries, as the best undergraduate contribution in each respective field.

Ms. O’Connor developed the idea for the essay based on her coursework from a wound management module taught by Ms Siobhán Murphy, a lecturer in the School of Nursing & Midwifery at UCC. She also had a keen interest in wound care having spent an intensive week at a wound management clinic at the South Infirmary Victoria University Hospital, Cork working alongside Sinead Dennehy, a Clinical Nurse Specialist in wound care.

Ms. O’Connor had six other Highly Commended students to contend with in the Nursing & Midwifery category, from the University Pennsylvania, King’s College London, Queen’s University Belfast, University of Ulster and St Angela’s College of Education in Sligo, to receive the top prize in her field. As the overall winner of her category, she will attend the Undergraduate Awards 2013 Global Summit taking place in Dublin, Ireland from 13-15 November,  where she will receive the Bram Stoker Gold Medal, along with Ms. Kennedy, as international recognition as a top student and the opportunity to network with peers and a community of UA scholars.

Remarking on her win, Ms. O’Connor said, “It’s fantastic to have an opportunity to compete at an international level and to demonstrate the impact nursing research can have on our health and well-being. As our society ages, chronic venous leg ulcers are becoming a serious problem not just for patients as they are quite debilitating, painful and take a long time to heal, but they also place a huge resource burden on our health service. I hope that my research can provide nurses and other healthcare professionals on the ground with better evidence for treating this condition.”

The Undergraduate Awards is the only international pan-discipline academic awards programme in the world, in operation across the island of Ireland since 2009 and operating globally since 2011. It aims to recognise the best students in the world and to connect them to one another so as to encourage inter-disciplinary co-operation that also transcends borders. It is cited as the ultimate champion for high potential undergraduates, as it provides top performing students with the support, network and opportunities they require to raise their profiles and further their career path.

The full list of winners can be found here: http://www.undergraduateawards.com/winners/winners-2013 The winners in each category were selected by a judging panel, made up of academics and industry experts from each field, and from across the globe. Winners secure for themselves attendance at The UA Global Summit, which is taking place across Dublin from November 13th-15th.  Further information on the Summit is available here http://www.undergraduateawards.com/the-prize-2/the-prize

Several more UCC students also emerged as winners in the shortlist round announced in September 2013, with eleven UCC students in total highly commended across seven of the categories. Life Sciences had the highest UCC representation, in which four UCC students were recognised, including Rebecca Neal, Oleksandr Nychyk, Louise O’Sullivan and Aileen Sweeney. Other categories with UCC students shortlisted included Business and Economics (Jesse Harrington), Law (Anne Marie Shea), Nursing and Midwifery (Siobhan O’Connor), Psychology (Conal Wrigley), Social Innovation (Pádraig de Rís and Jessica Kennedy) and Languages and Linguistics (Martina Viscardi).

*From each of the 22 shortlisted categories (which generally contain 4-6 candidates), there is an island of Ireland category winner picked and an international category winner picked. Then one overall winner is picked. Each of the 22 overall winners get published in the UA annual journal, though both Irish and overall winners (44 in total) are invited to attend the summit mentioned above and each receives a medal.

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