T&T student cops third prize in regional essay competition

Zachary Luke Subran-Ganesh, 16, earned third place at a regional essay competition hosted by the Caribbean Association of National Telecommunications Organisations (Canto). The competition challenged young people to share their views on “Women and Girls in ICTs.” Subran-Ganesh is no stranger to international competition, having represented Trinidad and Tobago at the International Olympiad in Informatics in Canada last year.

The Canto essay challenge was answered by scores of students from Antigua, Belize, The Bahamas, Dominica, Guyana, St Kitts & Nevis, St Vincent & the Grenadines, Jamaica, St Maarten, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. This was Subran-Ganesh’s first time attempting the annual competition but he was driven.

“I was really interested in this year’s topic,” he said, adding that his research helped him better understand why women were so under-represented in the industry and what could be done to attract them to studies in ICT (information and communications technology).

Entries for the essay competition were judged by a panel of experts in the fields of telecommunications and education and were scored for creativity, organisation, mechanics and educational/technical merit. For his efforts, Subran-Ganesh won the blink/bmobile-sponsored prize of US$250 and a Blu Studio 5.3 smartphone.

Blink/bmobile has sponsored T&T prizewinners of the competition for a number of years and Naresha Ali-Belmonte, manager for mobile marketing, praised Subran-Ganesh on his insightful essay. “We believe that encouraging young people to seriously look at the role ICT plays in positively impacting the society is one way of getting more people to see it as a change agent,” Ali-Belmonte said.