Trinity Global Relations recently interviewed Iseult Ward (Founder & CEO of the Irish company Foodcloud).
1. What is FoodCloud and how did you come up with the idea?
FoodCloud is a social enterprise that connects businesses with surplus food and charities in the community who need it. It’s essentially a platform that lets charities know there’s food available, and allows them to collect it, eliminating food waste too!
Marielle Kelly is one of Trinity’s Careers Advisors. She regularly travels with the TCD Global team to speak to students around the world, and will be attending our upcoming US Open Days in New York and Boston.
There are so many ways to develop your skills and learn outside of the classroom while studying at Trinity College Dublin. Great grades are important, but employers look for so much more than that. They want to hire exceptional graduates who can demonstrate their abilities through involvement in activities outside of the curriculum. Trinity College Dublin provides and promotes many ways for you to get involved, here are five ideas to get you started!
The opportunity to be active in a society is part of what makes the Trinity experience so unique. From getting involved in debating as part of our famous Hist and Phil societies, to trying out your skills on the stage with the Players group, to managing your own stock portfolio with the Student Managed Fund, there really is something for everyone when it comes to societies. Not only will you have great fun, you’ll get to grow your network and develop skills like public speaking, marketing or event management. Trinity has over 200 societies and sporting teams for you to join. More information is available online: http://www.trinitysocieties.ie/
We have a state-of-the art sports centre and over 40 sports clubs. Employers love to see that students have taken part in a sport, because it shows drive and commitment – fitting in regular training sessions isn’t easy! Being part of a sports team, like our rugby or ultimate Frisbee teams, or Gaelic football if you want to try our national sport, is a great way to prove that you are a great team player. Or perhaps you’re more interested in individual sports like athletics, golf or boxing, and these can really demonstrate your ability to motivate yourself to succeed.
We’re a target university for top graduate employers like Bank of America, KPMG, Deloitte, PWC and more, and the Careers Advisory Service advertises hundreds of work experience and internship opportunities every year. Doing a summer internship is a great way to get work place experience and understanding what type of career you would like to have after college. It can be tough to decide your next steps, so the more practical experience you can get in the work place, the better placed you will be to make decisions about your future or your next direction. Employers will appreciate that instead of spending all your summers on a beach, you were proactive and did something to improve your employability.
Competing, and succeeding, looks fantastic on your resume. It highlights your competitive streak, and shows how you are able to get ahead of the crowd and outperform your peers. That’s the kind of graduate employers like to hire! Depending on your interests you could take part in competitions such as Google’s Online Marketing Challenge, the Deloitte Top Technology Competitiong, the GradIreland National Student challenge and more.
Volunteering is a brilliant way of contributing to society and developing and demonstrating a whole range of skills and attributes. It shows that you have a social conscience, but it also displays initiative and a strong work ethic, because it takes work to balance different commitments. Depending on the type of volunteering you do, you will also develop skills such as teaching if you support a younger person through TCD’s Voluntary Tuition Programme, or supporting others through our S2S student mentoring initiative, or your ability to work in different cultural situations if you choose to go overseas with SUAS and work on educational projects in Kenya or India. You will get life experience, you’ll learn new things, and you could also get a reference. There’s so much to gain when you give back!
Recently there has been a strong push for student engagement with charities at Trinity, as seen during RAG ( Raise and Give ) week. During RAG week different societies and organizations within college compete to raise money for their respective causes. RAG week has been a part of Irish student life for a long time, and every year it keeps on growing and expanding to support more local charities and causes.
Specifically in Trinity it is organised and run by the Students’ Union and Trinity Volunteering, and is supported by Trinity alumni via a grant of €10,000 matched funding. This has been a great incentive for Trinity Societies, because now they know for every euro they raise they get another one from matching, allowing them to give more to their preferred charity/cause.
One of Trinity’s new charities is “Change for Change”, an initiative set up by a few Trinity students to tackle Dublin’s homeless issue. “Change for Change” started in September by 5 trinity students (Fiona, Amr, Jill, Pamela, Timmy); its aim was to change the concept of homeless charities, and empower people to be able to help themselves. They proposed a new program including: weekly classes on building CV’s; accommodation for the period of program; and internships with companies to give candidates relevant work experience. Above all, after the 6 month program is complete, they aim for each participant in the program to be in full employment, using help from partnering agencies/companies.
This program started to grow, and took on 3 more students to manage the additional workload( Derek, Mary, Rebecca ). Since then, the program has reached new heights and has been showing great promise. During RAG week they set out a Treasure hunt around campus with a twist. Some of the clues were pretty easy to find (’15-love’, being the tennis courts), while others required a bit more thought. Students walked around college and had to take selfies with the respective objects they found. This, obviously, brought out some hilarious pictures!
“Change for Change” is set to hit the ground running and become one of Trinity’s leading NPOs set up by students. Click below to check out the Facebook page and see how it’s getting on:
https://www.facebook.com/EnactusChangeForChange
Amr is a third year Bio-engineering student working as a Student Ambassador in the Global Room who set up “Change for Change” this year.
In looking at colleges in high school, I was planning on going to Boston or a UC school when a Trinity representative came to my high school and told us about Trinity. I thought traveling during college sounded like a great idea. It’s the one time in your life you aren’t really tied down to family or career and being in Europe sounded fun. Not to mention that the education at Trinity is one of the best in the world.
Having Trinity be a mostly enclosed campus, it felt more like a community than I was expecting even though it’s in the middle of a busy city. I could always walk into Trinity and see someone I knew. Dublin is a wonderful city for a college student. There are so many young people and tons of things to do from pubs and clubs to museums, art galleries and theatre. Not to mention all the great places you can visit outside the city and in the rest of Europe. Traveling around during weekends and holidays was one of the best parts of going to Trinity. I wish I had done more!
I loved my course. I did Psychology at undergraduate level and then did a master in Neuroscience. Not only was the material interesting, it was really well taught. Both departments had wonderful professors who felt more like colleagues than teachers. I felt comfortable going to their offices to ask questions and they usually knew us all by name which is rare to find in a University.
Coming back to San Francisco after my Psychology BA and Neuroscience Masters, I found it easy to get a job with my degrees. Employers love to talk about Ireland. Everyone seems to have an Irish uncle, cousin, great grandmother twice removed or some kind of connection with Ireland and it was always a positive talking point in interviews. They also seemed impressed that I was well traveled by 22 years old. I’ve been working mostly in medical research and now I am a health and nutrition counselor working with patients in a medical office.
Alice Galvin Chambers is a Trinity graduate from California. She completed a BA (Hons) in Psychology in 2007 and an MSc in Neuroscience in 2008 at Trinity College Dublin.
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