University of Bristol students, Kareem Doomun and Isfaaq Jadhakhan, beat out over 1000 competitors from leading universities across the UK, Ireland and Canada to reach the semi-finals of the Keyloop Dealer Tech Competition. The Engineering Design with Study in Industry (MEng) students formed the team EDes and won £1000. Their innovative idea to use incorporate devices such as cameras and wearable VR to measure and recall an immersive test drive experience thereby supporting the car buying decision.
The Dealer Tech competition is in its second year of running and is designed to encourage new talent in technology to network with industry professionals, team up with friends and develop their product ideas. We spoke to Kareem and Isfaaq about their experience.
Explain your competition entry in a sentence.
A system to integrate more emotions in the car buying process and gathering accurate customer data for dealerships.
How did you come up with your idea?
We were inspired by our AI unit this year and followed a systematic design process to develop our solution.
What advice would you give to other students pitching ideas in competitions?
Just do it. you need to believe in your ideas and make sure to explore it and do some proper market research to back your points. The university offers a lot of support in terms of online courses and prototyping to support your development and allows you to gain new skills. Pitching Ideas can be intimidating but the more you do it, the more you develop many beneficial soft and transferable skills that are extremely valuable in industry.
What’s next for you?
We plan to complete our Masters and apply all the experience gained from this competition in our studies. We plan to try to participate as many other competitions as possible.
Have you ever used the University’s Careers Service?
We have attended talks by a Careers Service representative.
We are so inspired EDes’ success. Not only did they use their knowledge to develop fresh tech-focused product ideas, but they also gave professional presentations to a panel of expert judges at Keyloop. Both the achievement and the experience will give our competitors an edge as they kick off their careers in the industry and look to impress employers.
As Keyloop CEO Tom Kilroy relates:
‘In 2022 the competition equipped all our entries with new skills and experiences to help them succeed in the competitive graduate employment space.’
Congratulations, Isfaaq and Kareem!
