It was an average Friday afternoon in school, sitting in chemistry trying to understand what any of it actually means. Sitting in complete silence, may I add, due to the fact most of the class were participating in a sponsored silence for Autism Awareness Day. This, as you can imagine, made chemistry even more confusing.
I was silently trying to figure out what was going on, clicking through the colours on my pen, hoping that if I highlighted enough words it would all make sense, until there came a knock on the door. Slowly we all dropped our pens, turned around and watched as a student was called out where a hushed conversation began. A few seconds later there was an excited laugh and the same student came rushing back though the door to exclaim, “Omg Bike Bag won us Stormzy tickets for tonight!!!” As you can imagine, there then followed a chorus of, “That’s crazy!”, “No way!”, “Omg!”, while the rest of us silently tried to show our excitement with some frantic, random and completely made up sign language.
Several rushed hours later, and I was standing with an uninterrupted view of Stormzy playing his Heavy is the Head tour three years after it was released in the 3Arena. The concert was amazing and the energy was electric. Luckily the sponsored silence had ended at the same time school did so we were able to scream along to our hearts’ content. It was during one of these moments singing along to songs I love, that I was extremely grateful that this year my friends and I had entered the Young Enterprise Ireland competition. Because finally all the months of hard work creating our bike repair kit and representing our school in the regional competition all felt worth it purely thanks to a wonderful spot prize!