Huawei’s ‘TECH4HER’ scholarships will support UCC STEM students

1 Dec 2022

Ten UCC STEM students are set to receive scholarships as part of the Huawei Ireland ‘TECH4HER’ programme which offers a total of €90,000 annually in financial awards broken down across three universities to eligible female students studying STEM subjects.

The Huawei Tech4her Scholarships demonstrate Huawei’s commitment to diversity and inclusion in the tech sector. The scholarships, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, provides students with a financial award and the opportunity to engage with employees from Huawei to learn about career paths and skills for work in the tech sector.

The Huawei ‘TECH4HER’ programme is offering a total of 20 scholarships this year, with ten for UCC, eight for TU Dublin, and two for UCD. Students will be able to avail of financial awards as well as masterclasses and some other opportunities of engaging with outstanding female ambassadors offered from Huawei Ireland. The three universities have identified promising awardees who will soon receive the bursary.

Aimed at inspiring ambitious female STEM students, who want to make a real contribution to Irish society, the application process involves candidates providing a personal statement on their passion for STEM, future career hopes, and barriers faced as a woman in this field, as well as an interview with an esteemed university panel. Top-performing students will then be awarded the scholarship, which will be provided for the current academic year.

Speaking at the announcement of the third year of the programme, Rujing Guo, PR and CSR manager for Huawei Ireland, said:

“Huawei is committed to empowering women by giving them more opportunities to harness the immense potential of digital technology to transform society. Our mission is to support women who want to pursue a career in the exciting areas of ICT and STEM, with this initiative and our partnership with the SFI Research Centre Lero in the CodePlus programme which promotes coding for secondary school girls. ICT is traditionally a male-dominated area. In May of this year, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) published new data which showed that less than one-third (32pc) of Ireland’s ICT workers are women. We hope that our efforts will help close the gender gap in STEM in Ireland and help attract more young women into the ICT industry to drive sustainable and inclusive growth across the country.”

Professor Sarah Culloty, Head of College of Science, Engineering and Food Science (SEFS) at University College Cork added:

"We are delighted to work with Huawei again to offer these scholarships to our students. The programme provides our female students with the opportunity to reach their full potential in an exciting and innovative area of study that will help transform our future society. I am especially pleased that the initiative has been extended to include our postgraduate and PhD candidates who are engaged in ground-breaking STEM research at UCC".

The third year of the TECH4HER scholarship programme will continue to support change and to tackle the ongoing gender gap in STEM both in Ireland and aboard. Recent Pfizer research in Ireland confirmed the gender gap between male (15%) and female (7%) participation in STEM professions, while Engineers Ireland has stated that female engineers represent just 12% of the engineering profession in this country.

About Huawei Ireland

Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. With integrated solutions across four key domains – telecom networks, IT, smart devices, and cloud services – Huawei is committed to bringing digital to every person, home, and organisation for a fully connected, intelligent world. Huawei employs over 195000 people in 170 countries across the globe.

Huawei has been in Ireland since 2004, with its business now serving over three million people and supporting over 900 direct and indirect jobs. Huawei’s business activities in Ireland continue to thrive. Intelligent connectivity with fibre and 5G technologies has begun and will empower the market of mobile networks and broadband networks with AI and IOT technologies. Huawei Ireland is working very closely with local operators and partners and is focused on nurturing future talent and highly-skilled professionals in these areas across the country.

Huawei works with several Irish third-level institutions, including University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University, University of Limerick, University College Dublin, funding vital Irish research into video, artificial intelligence and cloud computing. The company also partners key Science Foundation Ireland centres such as Connect, Insight, Adapt and Lero.