Nearly 600 candidates applied for the 77 scholarships. The Development Fund has been awarding scholarships for decades. This year, seven new sponsors contributed: Rantelon, Comodule, XRP Ledger Trust, Onninen, Sandla Puit, Ernst & Young and Mapri Ehitus. Tallinna Vesi and the Estonian Society of Heating and Ventilation Engineers are once again contributing.

Comodule, a company founded by the TalTech alumni Kristjan Maruste, Teet Praksi and Heigo Varik, established a scholarship named Sander Paas in honour of their late Formula Student teammate. "We highly value enthusiastic engineers who are eager to develop solutions that are important for society, yet integrated and technically versatile. The choice to award a scholarship to a postgraduate student in information technology or electronics was made precisely because Sander was an intelligent technical developer with an educational background in electronics," confirmed Heigo Varik.

Watch the ceremony here.

Awarding a scholarship is a good way to contribute to the next generation and for employers to get noticed by hard-working and highly motivated students.

Supporting students with scholarships is a great opportunity for employers to get noticed by high-achieving students. In addition, the issuer of the scholarship will be able to get in touch with all of the applicants. It is as if the employer now has a number of candidates who are interested in further cooperation with the company. However, the nature of the cooperation will be up to the company and the candidates to decide.

We can see that the companies ready to contribute to the scholarships through the Development Fund are usually eager to cooperate in other ways as well. This could entail suggesting topics for graduation theses, developing curricula and subjects, providing internships, etc.

In addition, the essays and motivation letters of the competition generate a lot of fresh ideas for how to further develop the field, what topics the students are interested in and how they would integrate new technologies and opportunities into the company's processes.

Karl Taklaja, Member of the Board of Rantelon, a company that awarded a scholarship to a TalTech student for the first time this year, considers supporting the young telecommunications engineers to be one of the organisation's key missions: “We support creativity and happy purposeful people.”

Supporting the alma mater

The alumni of TalTech are an important engine in the Estonian economy. Awarding scholarships is one of the many ways of giving back to their alma mater.

Robert Kitt, Chairman of the Council of the Development Fund, highlighted the importance of the university alumni in training future engineers and economists: the record numbers of scholarships are the best criteria for this.

The planning and preliminary work with cooperation partners is already underway for the Spring 2022 scholarship competition. You can find more information on taltech.ee/en/development-fund or by contacting arengufond@taltech.ee.

See the full gallery of the ceremony on Facebook.