The new multi-storey car park is open - just. There are cardboard boxes over the ticket dispensers. Drills whine amidst a tangle of wires while large diggers trundle past. More parking at DCU is good news for the electronics department which is eagerly awaiting the transformation of the temporary car park into an electronics building.
The new facilities will be too late for fourth-year student Keith Sweeney, but his enthusiasm for the telecommunications engineering degree is undimmed. An army lieutenant, he says the course is interesting but tough. Sweeney will take his skills back to the army when he graduates.
Fellow student Adam Neary is not sure where he wants to work, although he would like to stay in Ireland. There are lots of jobs for graduates - most have offers before they leave college. Starting salaries are in the region of £17,000 to £20,000.
Elva O'Reilly was one of six girls who started the course, four years ago. She took a year out to work in Ericsson and will return there after she graduates. Her advice to second-level students is that it's a difficult course, but if you're willing to put in the work it'll be fine.
Ericsson gives a prize to first-year students - £1,000 to the two students with the top Leaving Certificate grades (one male and one female). Grainne Hanley, who got 500 points in her Leaving Cert, and Ciaran O Conaire, 590 points, were last year's beneficiaries. Both are happy with their course and college choice.
Grainne says DCU is more intimate than a larger college. "You get to know your lecturers - and you get work experience before you leave college," she says. Ciaran says all of the lecturers have their own webpage and students have Internet access. In some of the courses, lecture notes and past papers are on the web.
The first cohort of graduates left DCU in 1998. Sheila McIntyre was among them. "I did my intra (placement) in the University of Valencia. I had a little Spanish and picked it up as I went along." Now working in Bridgecom, in Dublin, she says the course was a good preparation for the job.
Another 1998 graduate, Ed Gray, got offered a job as a technical trainer with Ericsson after his final-year project presentation. "There was no interview; they just offered me the job. A lot of the courses I'm teaching now, I studied in detail in DCU."
In spite of these glowing testimonials, DCU is having trouble attracting second-level students on to the course. This year, there are five vacant places in first year. Only 20 students accepted places (second-round cut-off points: 325). There is a requirement for a minimum of a higher-level C3 in Leaving Cert maths.
The faculty has set up a website with a competition to attract and inform sixth-year students. Students can win a cash prize of £1,000. There are also 20 prizes of mobile phones on offer.
And, in case you don't know, telecommunications is a "complex system of three things - networks, sophisticated software, state-of-the-art electronic hardware". Telecommunications engineering is "the creation of the connections that allow people to communicate over a distance".
Course lecturer John Murphy says he thinks the problem with attracting second-level students is a "mismatch between perception of the degree and what it actually is. If you open The Irish Times business supplement, about half of the ads are from telecoms companies. People think telecoms is just about Eircom and Esat - the website competition is designed to inform students and to tell them that the job opportunities are exceedingly good."
DCU has a suite of electronic engineering degrees and is introducing another new degree this year - digital media engineering.
The competition: http://telecoms.eeng.dcu.ie
