Elias Amro
“You're able to just live your life in the way that you want to here. Whereas, at the moment, that's not possible in Palestine.”
When he moved to Dublin to study at DCU, Elias Amro was excited about the opportunity, but admits his mind was often elsewhere.“You would constantly be checking the news, making sure your parents are safe, calling your parents. There's so much uncertainty in day-to-day life in Palestine, and it often left me battling with my own thoughts here in Ireland,” says Elias, who comes from Bethlehem in the West Bank.
There were times when Elias felt that the stress would seriously affect his results, but at the end of his MSc in Electronic and Computer Technology programme, he emerged with first-class honours and came top of his class.
IFP Scholarship and Choosing DCU
Elias was awarded the prestigious Ireland Fellow Programme (IFP) scholarship, and says he chose to study here because he knew about the broad support here for the plight of the Palestinian people. Having completed a Computer Science degree, he was eager to expand his expertise and picked DCU because it was “the one that intrigued me the most” due to its ambitious and dynamic approach.
Elias found that “the facilities available to you were amazing in DCU.” Among the course elements he enjoyed most were modules on cybersecurity, object-oriented programming with embedded systems, web application development and entrepreneurship for engineers.
Supporting the Circular Economy with an AI-powered App
Much of this formed the building blocks for his final project, a sustainability-focused web platform for students, which lets them buy and sell second-hand goods more easily.
The ‘Student Outlet’ project was motivated by research indicating that a third of Irish students are facing financial difficulties. Elias also hoped to support the ‘circular economy’ and reduce the amount of reusable items entering the waste stream at the end of each semester.
Elias says the time needed to post items on similar apps “was one of the major deterrents for students selling and buying stuff.” To address this, he built an AI-assisted listing tool as part of the platform, which reduces the time needed from ten to two minutes.
Using the phone’s camera, it assesses the condition of the goods and populates the form for the user. “So you just snap a photo, it's as simple as that, and it will do the process for you.”
Elias is now hoping to commercialise the Student Outlet platform, and based on existing data, he estimates that if the app was scaled up and used by the DCU student population it could prevent over 700 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year.
Personal Journey and Campus Life
The success of the project was a significant contributor to Elias’s first-class result. However, he admits that the stress of having family living in a conflict zone meant that at one point, he feared he might fail the course.
Elias says he had to develop strategies during this period to manage the stress and prioritise his personal wellbeing. He describes it as a period in which he learned a lot about himself. This was supported through counselling sessions provided by DCU and ICOS. “It was very, very overwhelming. It still is to some extent, but at least now I've learned much better how to manage it.”
A good distraction was the non-academic side of campus life, and Elias got involved in activities like rock climbing and archery. “I made some amazing friends,” he says of his time at DCU.
Making Ireland Home
Having completed his degree, Elias is now employed in the DCU Mobility Office. His current tasks include streamlining their software systems to make them more user-friendly and automating other logistical tasks, so that the team is “just able to focus on the things that do matter.”
Elias says he’s focused on making Ireland his home for now, but Palestine remains on his mind.
“People are still getting bombed now. They’re still annexing more land,” he says about the current situation in Palestine, and life there comes with “this constant fear of just being arrested for literally nothing.”
“You're able to just live your life in the way that you want to here. Whereas, at the moment, that's not possible in Palestine.”