Büşra Bircan and Michaël O’Keane are two visiting interns to Trinity this summer, and have been contributing to some of our DWR UISCE and REDAWN research activities.
Busra in our hydraulics lab.
Büşra Bircan is an Erasmus internship student from Turkey. Büşra is an Environmental Engineering and Electrical Engineering undergraduate at Istanbul Technical University, and is working with the team for two months this summer. She is helping with some our drain water heat recovery in the lab as well as quantifying hot and cold water consumption profiles of different sized households in Ireland, whilst compare Irish patterns with that in other EU countries.
Büşra was happy to have a first experience in academic setting, learning how to analyse the data, profile water consumption and understand water use behaviours. In her words: "I feel this experience improved my research skills. This will help me for my graduation project and future projects. Also, I hadn’t been in Ireland before this internship and I tried to discover as much as I can, which is really amazing." Also: "I am very interested in having more experience with industry and to learn more about how sustainability applied to their context". - said Büşra to our team.
Michael with our laboratory test rig!
Michaël O’Keane is spending three months with us here in Trinity. He's a Hydraulic & Civil Engineering student, studing for a MSc in Grenoble Institute of Technology. His internship has been supported by La region Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Michael's objective was to help our team assessing the potential of micro-hydropower in networks through Dwr Uisce, but he has also been focusing on crop irrigation needs and the power recover potential from an irrigation network in Spain for the REDAWN project.
He was happy to learn more about R&D and how the process of finding data can be tricky. Also, that even if you have the right data set, and the analysis is done, results might not be exactly what you expected. Michael was surprised to learn about new possibilities: "I realized that you could first start your career in the private world and then come back to the University world and do a PhD. There is no boundaries or set limits really, you can choose your path".
What next?
Büşra "I have two more years until my graduation. I want to learn more about sustainability in different economy sectorFor s."
Michaël "I want to complete my studies and find a 6-month placement in a private organisation, preferably in coastal construction."
Good luck to you both in your future water and energy research adventures!!!