By Business & Finance 
Shiofra Ryan from ‘An Tionchar’ is one of 17 students who have won a place at the Winners’ Bootcamp in June, hosted at University College Cork and organised by the Local Enterprise Offices.
A group of enterprising secondary school students are leaving the classroom behind to embark on a week-long business bootcamp at this year’s Student Enterprise Awards Business Bootcamp at University College Cork.
In all, 17 teenage entrepreneurs across eight different student enterprises from Offaly, Louth, Dublin, Mayo, Westmeath, Wexford, Limerick and Kildare have won a place at this year’s Winners’ Bootcamp, which will help them expand and grow their entrepreneurship skills.
Organised by the 31 Local Enterprise Offices, the third annual bootcamp is hosted by the College of Business and Law at University College Cork in association with the IGNITE Graduate Business Innovation Programme for the first time, from June 8th to 13th.
Students were selected from the Senior Category award winners at this year’s Student Enterprise Awards National Final, which took place in Croke Park in April.
Throughout the programme, students will expand their business knowledge and develop their enterprise ideas through challenges, team building sessions and project workshops. Gaining new perspectives and accessing expertise may help the students become the business owners and leaders of the future, according to organisers.
The winners attending this year’s bootcamp include students from: ‘An Tionchar,’ a patent-pending boot designed to reduce injuries in hurling (St Brendan’s Community School, Co. Offaly); ‘Aqua-Pro’, stain resistant treatments for clothes and fabrics (St Andrew’s College, Blackrock, Co. Dublin); ‘The Rain Harvester’, a self-contained over-ground water filtration system (Coláiste Ris, Co. Louth); and ‘Gift Gro’ (Newbridge College, Co. Kildare), grow-it-yourself plant and herb kits.
The annual Student Enterprise Awards Programme began in classrooms last September, where 17,000 students from 370 schools, researched, set-up, and managed real-life-businesses, as part of the biggest student enterprise programme in the country.
The next Student Enterprise Awards Programme for 2015/2016 gets underway in September with video resources and school materials available through www.studententerprise.ie. Teachers are being encouraged to contact their Local Enterprise Offices, to register for the 2015/2016 programme.
