Trips to Singapore, London, Milan and Stockholm, lucrative job offers, entrepreneurs promising millions in profits: it sounds like the lifestyles of the rich and famous, but these blandishments are the more remarkable for being the experiences of a young Cork woman who has yet to sit her Leaving Cert exams.
Sarah Flannery was just 16 when she won the Esat Young Scientist and Technology exhibition in January last year with a project on cryptography, the business of keeping computer information secret. The prize launched her into an unfamiliar world of celebrity, with the international media clambering for interviews and lawyers offering to capitalise on her discoveries.
The attention waned as time went by and as Sarah entered sixth year at her school, Scoil Mhuire gan Smal in Blarney, Co Cork. But now she is about to stir things up again with the launch of a book in which she describes the roller-coaster ride that started with her Young Scientist win.
At her home outside Blarney village, the family computer lists dozens of book-related engagements which begin this month and continue through to June. She will deliver "The Last Word Lecture" at the Royal Geographic Society in London next month and will do book-signings here and across Britain as part of the launch. The book, In Code, A Mathematical Journey, will be serialised over 12 weeks in the London Telegraph and she has been interviewed for a long piece in the Times Education Supplement.
Yet, whatever the hype, she remains a Leaving Cert student preparing like any other for her examinations, now just weeks away. She has done all the normal CAO and UCAS applications for a university place, and is targeting in particular two Irish universities. She sits orals in German and Irish next month and will struggle to keep up the pace of study as she strikes out to meet the media over the next two months.
Don't for a moment, however, think she is undertaking such a tough promotions schedule because of greed or in search of fame. Nor is she driven on by ambitious parents. Rather, she impresses as a focused and determined young woman who has a gift for, and a genuine love of, mathematics. She undertook her Young Scientist project for the challenge it contained, and the book that neatly explains her computational findings is in a sense a continuation of this challenge.
Sarah is living proof that you don't have to be a geek to enjoy science. She lives, with her family, in a country farmhouse built at the turn of the century. It is just a short walk from Blarney, and the topmost battlements of the village's famous castle can just be seen from the house, over the treetops. The Flannery home sits at a considerable height overlooking the River Shournagh and offers spectacular views across the valley through which it flows.
Sarah, 18 since late January, is the oldest of five children including Michael, 16, Brian, 14, David, 10 and Eamonn, seven. Her father, David, is a maths lecturer at the Cork Institute of Technology and her mother, Elaine, lectures at the Institute in biology and microbiology. David clearly is Sarah's mentor, guide and adviser in her mathematical endeavours, and co-authored the book with her.
The family, surrounded by a busy dairy farm, lives in the countryside close to nature. Sarah has been influenced by this - even if collectively the family is more committed to academia than to agriculture. She loves outdoor pursuits and admits: "I absolutely love being here. We are two minutes from the village but it is absolutely private."
She runs, every week, with the local athletics club, plays basketball and gaelic sports with her school and is deeply involved in horseback riding, both eventing and dressage, a passion which she can cultivate in Blarney but also when visiting her aunt in Kerry, who keeps horses.
Such pastoral isolation seems incongruous set against the pandemonium that descended after the Young Scientist prize. The award was announced on a Friday evening, to be followed by reports in the Irish media and a small number of interviews and phone calls from friends, relations and well-wishers. The Wednesday after, however, the London Times made Sarah and her cryptography project a page one report and hers was the main picture on the page. It told how she had baffled the competition judges and described her in terms appropriate to a prodigy (an appellation she and her parents resist as vigorously as they do the term genius when applied to her achievements).
She had been interviewed for a feature-piece inside the newspaper, of the "Young girl beats boffins" ilk, but was taken by surprise when it landed on page one. She believes that had it remained inside, her story would never have sparked the media reaction it did. And that response could only be described as overwhelming, she admits.
News-wire services picked up the story and within hours she was receiving calls from New Zealand, the Continent, the US and South America. She remembers in particular an interview with Radio Columbia, based in Bogata, which required parallel translation. She fielded 65 calls from the media on that day, doing interviews with many and answering requests for visits by film crews. "The only way I had to deal with it was just to get on with it," she says. She didn't particularly relish all the attention but knew that she had little option.
The media, she said, arrived in waves. "You could really call it three waves." First were the daily and weekly print reporters who needed their stories quickly. These were followed a week later by the broadcast media doing "genius at home"-type features which required her to be filmed at school, at the library and even while eating her breakfast. She had CBS and ABC crews from the US and also Irish and European companies. The last wave was the monthly magazine reporters looking for more in-depth reports.
"I particularly didn't like any form of camera or film," she says, preferring instead the print reporters. "The questions weren't difficult and very seldom did they ever ask about the project" or her research. It took weeks for the frenzy to die down, she says. The award was won in early January. "I didn't get back to school until February."