The Imagine Cup

Imagine Cup UK Logo 

Do you like technology? Want to kick start your career while at university? Fancy the opportunity to win a week in Microsoft headquarters in Seattle (Redmond) shadowing the Popfly team (amongst many prizes)? The opportunity to win an Xbox 360 Elite just for registering? Or just want to show that your university is better than its nearest neighbour?

The answer to all these is really simple - The Imagine Cup UK. The Imagine Cup is the world's biggest technology competition for students.

"Imagine a world where technology enables a more sustainable environment for all"

I think it will be hard to top this one in terms of students having the opportunity to positively affect their future - global warming and the many other environmental issues which affect us could be reduced or eradicated with the determination, creative thinking and technology muscle that the next generation can create.

Where do I start?

The quiz is a fun way to see if you are up to the mark - answer some easy -ish questions on technology and then register for the Imagine Cup and/or the High Performance Computing competition (UK only initiative for sciencestudents):

Click here to take the quiz (Check out the Leaderboard to see which universities are the brightest and best)

Imagine Cup Home page 

Once you've registered on the competitor site it's all about picking the competitions you want and going for it on www.imaginecup.com. Keep checking back in on the UK site to hear of the latest tips and advice, as well as information on prizes and UK specific events!

Which competitions?

Imagine Cup Banner

There are 9 invitationals to the Imagine Cup and the HPC competition which is a new specialised offering for scientists and engineers who have great ideas on how to build solutions on high performance computing clusters of computers (think Formula 1 fluid dynamics or genetic algorithm processing).

We have produced a glossy guide which you can download which helps you to start down the road of competing

What do I get in return?

Apart from all the great rhetorical questions I posed at the top...

We will announce in the next week or so the FULL prize roster which for the first year in the UK will have prizes for the best UK competitors across all 9 competitions. That means if you produce an amazing Silverlight UI for the Interface Design invitational you could win a week's experience at an agency and a good bit of kit to play with as well.

Good luck in the competition and don’t forget to tell all your friends about it – many of the competitions are team based!

Mark Johnston
Marketing Manager
https://blogs.msdn.com/markjo