JOHN TRAVERS

Award Year: 1995

Course: Engineering, Medicine

Activities: Engineering Society; Students’ Union; Class Representative

Occupation: Medical Doctor; Company Director

UCD breathed a new sense of endless possibility when I first went there in 1991 to study Engineering. It welcomed a vast gathering of students from all over the world, clambering their way across campus to class and to a new sense of self in the adult world. We were privileged with choice and anything was possible.

The engineers stood out I think. We were a give-away with our uniform of baggy, woollen jumpers. We gathered in exuberant groups outside Theatre A or the Physics and Chemistry Labs in the Science Block. We shuffled in droves from a long day’s lectures to the Library, the ‘Trap’, or the Student Bar. We played tearaway football on the field outside the Engineering Block in every weather.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays we had lectures in Earlsfort Terrace. Up the granite steps, worn smooth by thousands of Engineering and Medical students before us, through the massive oak doors, and into the arms of an old theatre and new knowledge. Hartigan’s offered respite just around the corner.

Our 268 first year students were raucous, riotous, and out of hand at times. Stories of the mass singsongs and synchronised paper airplane throwing in Maths lectures spread wide and soon students from every other discipline came just to witness this. It wasn’t fair to the lecturer scribing word-for-word on an overhead projector acetate, but it reflected a metamorphic spirit of freedom and excitement. There was a sense of being on the road to something great. As UCD Engineers we might help design and build the world around us, and the structures and technology that support it. In the meantime we embraced every moment: studying hard and jumping headlong into extracurricular sport, student politics, volunteering, music, and making lifelong friends.

I co-founded the Engineering Society in 1993 with great friends - John McManus, Gearoid O’Rafferty and Mathew Jackson - and with a guiding hand from School Chaplain, Fr Kieran McDermott. We created a Society that could be a voice for all Engineers. It became a platform for spreading engineering student creativity in our new university home as the move of Engineering from the Terrace to Belfield was completed. I was delighted to hear of awards the Society won over subsequent years.

Two decades later, after a fulfilling career in international energy and founding two clean energy companies at NovaUCD, I followed a late vocation and came back to Belfield in 2012 as a graduate entry medical student, a ‘GEM’. This was a fantastic new four-year programme that brought people with graduate experience into the world of Medicine.

Much had changed at Belfield. The football field outside the Engineering Block had become a sculptured lake. The acetate scribing had been replaced by online lecture slides. The new Health Sciences Centre, Student Centre, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool filled the once sprawling car park beside the Physics Labs.

The camaraderie, support, and good humour among classmates were no less all these years later. Remarkably, the same overflowing spirit of possibility was ever present. As UCD Medics, we could help to grow and enhance the world of life within us, and the ethics and technology that support it. The UCD degree was a passport to the practice of caring medicine.

I believe the collective imprint of every single person that has studied or worked at UCD has created the spirit of possibility that endures. I think it is one of the University’s greatest legacies in our lives.