14 April, 2015

A minibus of students travelled from CIT to Dublin on Tuesday 14th April to be part of the Student Summit 2015 hosted in the impressive Mansion House in Dublin.
Michael Lineham, CIT Student’s Union President; Wesley Connolly Tong  and Michelle Dorgan, Student Enterprise Interns in CIT with the aim of promoting entrepreneurship to students, lead the expedition.

There, several companies had their stands to present to students from all around Ireland their projects. Some of them even got CVs from some of the students. Companies like Jobbio and Microsoft, who were the Leading Sponsors of the event; FM104 andCampus.ie as media sponsors, and Uber, Eventbrite, Event Solutions and Generator as Event Sponsors.
Isabel Rossiter, Enterprise Administrator at the Hincks Centre for Entrepreneurship Excellence was there in one of the stands for the CEEN Students Engagement through Enterprise Societies presence.  This collaborative initiative involves a number of higher education institutes across Ireland coming together to increase the participation in enterprise societies across all Irish HEI’s.
At 6pm the speaker’s event started with a ‘Power Speaker’from Morning GloryVille: “Why not starts your day with an invigorating dance experience? This isn’t Zumba or Aerobics, this is conscious clubbing at its very best!” said Chris Flack  before turning the whole venue into one of these alcohol free party, full of dancers, making all the audience dance; lights, colours, music and free hugs. A perfect kick off for the event, but also for any morning before work.
After this surprise, The Summit featured gimmick-free panel discussions with entrepreneurs such as MCD matriarch Caroline Downey. As well as managing Hozier and running MCD, Downey has been a major fundraiser for the Christina Noble foundation. 
The speakers emphasised the importance of young people researching the company they applied to saying that they had problems with some interns in the Event Planning area because they had not done their research and thought that event planning was glamourous, but it is not. Working in events means that you are standing in the field first thing in the morning, you will probably eat bad food and you will be the last one to leave the office. But even though this sounds as a horrible thing, Mark Breen, from Cuckoo Events said something encouraging. He expects people to be happy working in his company, and he tries hard to make them happy. He pays the interns, and he tries to make them have a good experience. He said that if he finds out that people hate their job in his company, he would sell the company and do other thing.
Patrick Hamilton Walsh was the most inspiring speaker to the audience (people kept on tweeting about how inspiring they found him), he used to have ‘everything’, but he sold it to do what he really wanted to do: travel.
He used to work for a big company, and had all he dreamt about when he was a teenager by the age of 26, but he did not find happiness because he felt that he was mistaken on what he thought that would make him happy, so he asked the audience to follow their dreams even if they thought that they were unreal. He quoted Will Smith on Livin’ the Dream: “Being realistic is the most commonly travelled road to mediocrity”.
Eileen Denham, owner of Hangar in Dublin and Savoy in Cork advised the audience to clean up their social media before they apply for a job because she is big for creeping (sic.) on social media. Sometimes she does that during the interview because she wants her workers to look professional.
Whereas, Allan Dixon, who won The Best Job in the World competition, thought differently, he said that building up an image in social media is compulsory.
In conclusion, maybe the advice we get from these two speakers is to build up a conscious image in social media depending on what you expect for your future. As long as it is something you would not mind to be seen by anyone, it is ok to have it in your social media.
Student Summit was sponsored by Jobbio, a new employment website that partnered with USI. It allows people to upload Vimeo or Youtube videos, photo galleries, link social media account and have more thorough bios. The site takes the view that emailed CVs are dated, and employers want a more personable recruitment process.