You're Hired - ENNIS LOCAL STEPHEN MARKHAM WINS THE METEOR APPRENTICE

NUIGalway’s Emma Curtis Narrowly Misses Out

And then there was one......After weeks of battling it out to be crowned the Meteor Apprentice 24 year old Ennis, Co Clare man Stephen Markham has come out on top and bagged the recession friendly prize of an internship with the award winning marketing team in Meteor . Commenting on his big win Stephen said: “I am absolutely delighted. It’s been a tough seven weeks, but the support from friends and family was amazing. A huge thanks to everybody who voted for me. All the candidates were really strong, but I feel I was able to convey my personality and creativity in how I faced the tasks. I am thrilled to have won this opportunity.”

To celebrate Meteor’s sponsorship of the award-winning series, the mobile phone operator ran their own competition to mirror the boardroom dramas that took place every week on the hit show, which attracted record viewing numbers this year. While the 12 candidates battled it out in the boardroom under self made millionaire and taskmaster Bill Cullen on the The Apprentice, candidates in the Meteor apprenticeship role had to answer to Meteor s Head of Product Marketing, Bill Blake.

After a gruelling few weeks of tasks 21 year old Emma Curtis, a final year Commerce student specialising in Spanish and Marketing at NUIGalway and originally from Kinsale, Co. Cork lost out to the Publicity, Media and Marketing Assistant for Tourism Ireland who has a Master in Music Performance and a LLB under his belt.

 No doubt the bleak prospects facing many students now when they leave college inspired the record sign up to the unique competition with more than 1700 candidates applying. Each week the candidates had to carry out tasks set by the Marketing department. The Apprentices’ performance was then tracked and voted for by the public on Meteor’s dedicated Apprentice site http://apprenticeunseen.ie Mirroring the success of the Shinawil Series, the website, which featured exclusive behind the scene footage, news, polls and live blogs drew in record numbers. 700,000 of the website pages were viewed, with people watching the clips just over 250,000 times overall.

Commenting on today‘s announcement, Bill Blake, Meteor’s Head of Product Marketing, said: “We were really impressed with the high level of candidates we received and a big thank you and best wishes to all those who applied. Congrats to Stephen on his fantastic performance in the competition, who will join our team next year. We are all looking forward to welcoming him on board“