10 March, 2014

At the annual Institute Prizegiving event held at Cork Institute of Technology on Monday March 10th 2014, Arantxa Duque Barrachina was awarded the “Best Taught Masters Student” and the “Best Overall Student of the Year 2013″ award, a truly remarkable achievement.

Arantxa undertook her undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering at the Universitat Juame I ,Valencia, Spain. In 2007 she travelled to CIT as an Erasmus student and joined the BSc (Hons) in Software Development and Networking class. Returning to Spain in 2008 to finish her degree studies Arantxa received a first class honours award. After graduation, she decided to return to Cork to join VMware as a Technical Support Engineer in November 2009.

In 2011 she enrolled in the MSc in Cloud Computing programme at Cork Institute of Technology. Arantxa graduated with a first class honours award in May 2013 and was later awarded “Best MSc Student in the Department of Computing” as part of the CIT Faculty of Engineering and Sciences awards. The quality of her work has also been recognised internationally, with a peer reviewed paper based on her MSc work accepted for publication in the Springer Journal of Big Data and presented at the Collaborative European Research Conference (CERC) 2013 (Supervisor Dr. Aisling O' Driscoll).