This article is from page 5 of the 2013-10-29 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 5 JPG
A NORTH Clare student, whose third-level education was put in jeopardy because of changes to the student grants system, received the Dean’s Award when she graduated from NUI Galway last week.
Ballyvaughan student, Medb McCarthy, was one of three students used by the Union of Students of Ireland (USI) to launch a judicial review into changes made in the qualification criteria for the Non-Adjacent Maintenance Grant last year.
The review, which has still to be ruled on by the Supreme Court, is based around an increase in the distance from a third-level institution that a student has to live before they are classified as “non-adjacent”.
It meant that even though Medb lived outside Ballyvaughan, with no realistic opportunity to commute to or from college in Galway, she was still considered an “adjacent” or local student when it came to her grants payments.
“It was very difficult in final year. I managed to find accommodation in Galway that wasn’t expensive but it certainly wasn’t easy getting by in that last year. If it wasn’t for my parents I would have been able to afford it. There is doubt about that,” she said.
“I didn’t work [outside of college] in my final year. I knew a lot of people who worked in their final year and it really effected their results and I didn’t want that to happen to me.”
Medb was awarded the the Dean’s Award, which goes to this highest achieving student in each course, jointly with Eric Brockie. The pair received the award in the subject of Information Technology, after they designed an educational children’s computer game based on Homer’s Odyssey.
“We wanted to make a game for kids. I have a niece and nephew who are three and six years old and I know that age group well. I also studied Classics and for that reason I decided to loosely base the game on the Odyssey,” continued Medb.
“Eric, who made the game with me, studied Spanish so we also made a Spanish language version of the game. It was a lot of work but great fun too.”