Slingshot Academy to help secondary school students with college and course decisions

An exciting initiative helping secondary school students make the right choices in terms of colleges and courses is expanding to cover Cork, Limerick, and Galway this year.

Dubbed the Student Slingshot Academy, the project was set up by UCD student Patrick Guiney at the end of 2014.

Initially restricted to Dublin, the initiative has been so successful that, little more than 12 months after founding Student Slingshot, Patrick has decided to set up the academy in three more cities.

“It’s our goal to impact as many secondary school students between the ages of 15 and 19 as we can so we’re expanding a lot this year,” said Patrick. “The whole thing is free to attend, and it will always be free to attend, thanks to our partners at Bank of Ireland, Accenture, Enterprise Ireland, Smart Futures, and the HEA. The reason it exists is to give young people better knowledge about their options. It’s to give everyone a taste of what they can expect from college, no matter what their background is.”

The Student Slingshot Academy involves a day of talks, workshops, and a unique mentoring programme which pairs second-level students with college students and continues in the weeks and months after the student attends the academy.

Mentors are there to answer questions their paired pupil has about third- level institutions, college life in general, and about specialist subjects of interest to them such as medicine, journalism, law, media, and engineering — areas they would not necessarily learn about in second level.

“In a dream world, every single secondary school student would have a third-level mentor so that access to college was improved across the board, regardless of the background of the student, regardless of whether or not they might be the first generation of their family thinking about going to college,” said Patrick.

“It would also help the student to pick the course that’s right for them instead of picking something they don’t know anything about and finding out later they don’t like it. Obviously, we are a long way off from that, but we are on the right track and hopefully, we can get there eventually.”

Patrick said the demand has been “huge” and that their upcoming session in Galway, which takes place on January 26 and 27 at the Bank of Ireland Innovation Centre on Shop St, is completely booked up.

The Cork and Limerick sessions are also in high demand, though there are still a few places available on each.

“We’ll have places for between 200 and 250 students in Cork. It’s being held on March 1 in the Aula Maxima in University College Cork,” said Patrick.

“The Limerick event will take place on March 9 in the University of Limerick and there are still places available for that. If anyone wants to register for a place, they should go to www.slingshot.ie.”