Attracting talent early
The first of the ICT Centre's new undergraduate scholarships have been awarded to high-performing first year students.
Dr Trevor Bird and Ms Vinita Deshpande
These 'entrance' scholarships go to the five best students, in terms of academic performance at school, who enrolled full time in an IT or electrical engineering degree at the University of Sydney.
The scholarship is worth $2000 and the students will spend a week working with CSIRO at the end of the year.
'We're pleased to see students with high grades enrolled in relevant degree courses', said the Centre's Chief Scientist, Trevor Bird.
'Our hope is to persuade these high flyers to continue to focus on subjects that are relevant to ICT. The work experience at the end of the year will be a great opportunity to encourage these students further by engaging them in some of our research.'
The first of the entrance scholarships were awarded on Friday 8 May to Ms Vinita Deshpande and Ms Vanessa Komlos.
Ms Deshpande said she has always been interested in science subjects and information technology offered many opportunities.
Head of the university's School of Information Technologies, Associate Professor Sanjay Chawla, said: 'The CSIRO entrance scholarships helped us attract some of the brightest students to study IT in the University of Sydney. We thank CSIRO's ICT Centre for their initiative to attract the best minds to study the fascinating discipline of IT'.
The three remaining entrance scholarships were awarded at a ceremony on Friday 15 May.
The second type of scholarship is for students in second year and awards $2000 per year for three years. The first will be awarded in 2010. Awardees will do a vacation scholarship with CSIRO at the end of their third year and do their fourth year project jointly with CSIRO.
The scholarship scheme will be expanded to selected universities around Australia.
