These are the immortal words of Padraig Harrington’s son when he was hugged by his famous dad after receiving the Claret Jug.
Priceless.
Well done to Padraig – what a performance and a comeback.
I recently wrote a post about the last General Election. Well, the time is upon us for the Seanad elections. As a TCD grad, I am entitled to vote for the three Dublin University Seanad seats. There are 11 candidates for the three seats, so competition is likely to be hot. Here’s a brief list of the hopefuls, again, with the best web presence I could find for them.
Indymedia website has a brief run down of the candidates in this constituency, and their “genetic origins”.
My analysis:
As reported in yesterday’s Times in a piece entitled “Alarm as brightest students reject computing courses”, the HEA has recently published a report entitled Research Infrastructure in Ireland – Building for Tomorrow
I have not yet had an opportunity to digest the full report, but the newspaper article highlights that there has been “a decline in high points applicants to computing courses from 5.8 per cent in 2000 to 0.8 per cent last year”. While this is certainly a disappointing statistic when taken alone, it is part of a bigger picture. In particular, since about 2001 (the infamous dot-bomb era), the absolute number of school leavers choosing computing (and to a lesser degree engineering) courses has declined very sharply.
One can only assume that this is because mum and dad are worried that little Johnnie and Jane are not going to get good jobs in the tech sector when they graduate, and are steering them towards law/accountancy/civil engineering, or whatever. The ironic thing in all of this is, of course, that the tech sector here has recovered very well, and I would argue is in a much better state than ever it was in the late 90’s. Expectations are much more grounded now, and companies are focusing on revenues, profits, etc., and not just fund raising.
Given that it takes 4 years or so to get a Bachelors degree, if you had enroled in a computing course at the depths of the dot-bomb in 2002, you would have emerged with your shiny new BSc in 2006, as the market was back in full swing.
While I believe that the government is doing a pretty good job of kick starting an R&D culture here, it/we have been much less successful at selling technology and innovation as worthwhile careers for school leavers. This, we need to tackle as a matter of urgency.