The ad Venture to Silicon Valley Trinity Today catches up with Amy Flanagan , the trailblazing Trinity graduate and ESTEEM scholar who is making her mark in Silicon Valley here did Amy Flanagan, a gifted mathematician who has pivoted through engineering, high-level corporate consulting on to (now) Venture Capital in Silicon Valley, start out? ‘I was absolutely fascinated with Apple. I remember racing out of school when I was 10 or 11 to get home and all I wanted to do was watch Steve Jobs' entire keynote address for the latest product launches – and yes, buy them. I was hooked when they launched the iMac G3 and it came out in those translucent, vibrant colours that were just fun.’ The love for perfecting design, for opening up interesting things to see how they worked, was already in place; asked at primary school to redesign a sneaker, she went overboard, spending hours at the PC with Adobe and other tools, turning and readjusting a piece of footwear. Her maths skills bloomed while at Holy Child in Killiney. Amy’s love of numbers suggested maths for 3rd level, but her teacher Mr Keane said, “if you study maths you're never going to see a number again. What you might want to consider is engineering, because that is more about actually solving problems and numbers, while maths gets extremely theoretical.” ‘So he seeded the idea in my head.’ She found Trinity’s approach ‘unusual’ and attractive: ‘the first two years are general, you get to study electrical engineering, and computer and structural and mechanical all at the same time, before you fully make your decision.’ A memorable instance of that drive towards application and iteration came in winter of her sophomore year, when she spent days with a team in one of the labs, figuring out how to code three buggies to allow them autonomously move around unspecified track routes and follow traffic laws. ‘At the time it seemed like a very futuristic problem, but now I catch Waymos (autonomous driving taxis) all the time here in San Francisco and I can see this – clearly a significantly more advanced version of course – making a real difference in our day-to-day lives.’ She had entered Trinity right as the property bubble burst and the country was launched into the 2009 recession. There was ‘always worry about being able to get jobs and what the impact would be once we graduated, but Mr Keane’s advice was still proving solid. Despite the downturn, the
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