And the winner is....

Building on the MU’s core principle of sustainability, the university awards the annual Scholarship of Hope to the best ideas for sustainability proposed by students. Submissions are encouraged to present innovative ideas in the area of sustainability that meet the needs of the present and improve the welfare of future generations, and should be realizable at MU.

The SoH task force, comprised of staff and students from the Sustainability Committee, had the difficult assignment to select a winner from the raft of quality submissions. Weighing the attributes of innovation, feasibility, impact, and possibility of implementation at MU, the committee chose two projects to share the first place prize.

Dipl.-Ing Stefan Gindl, researcher and lecturer in New Media and Technology and head of the SoH committee commented ‘’it's great to see how much effort and time students spend on the idea of sustainability. The high quality of the submissions made the selection of the winners difficult, but we had a special focus on feasibility this time guiding our decision.''

On Monday, June 11th, the selected submissions were awarded €750 each in scholarship funds in a ceremony attended by faculty, staff and students.

Pius Binder, Marthissa März and Susanne Klepsch won honours for their technologically inclined proposal iMODUL, a smartphone app that would integrate various aspects of MU life in a single, easy-to-use digital platform. iMODUL would host such features as a curriculum builder, a tool for car sharing, and carbon footprint calculator, keep Modulians up-to-date on the latest news, be integrated with the MODUL Career database of job and internship vacancies.

Phillip Redl’s ideas were practical solutions –simple, yet effective ways to encourage sustainable practices on a daily level. MU Green Campus – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle proposes a system for returning reading packs at the end of the semester to be reused by the students in the following year, as well as a textbook buy-back system organized by the university. The second element deals with infrastructural improvements to avoid unnecessary waste like replacing one-use plastic cups with sturdy, reusable ones emblazoned with the MODUL University logo – thus making them both practical and special.

MODUL University Vienna applauds the Scholarship of Hope recipients and all those who submitted their keenest and greenest ideas!

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Pius Binder, Marthissa März and Susanne Klepsch for their iMODUL submission; Sustainability Committee members Jesse Alexander and Anja Hergesell with Philipp Redl for Green Campus, centre.