Hungarian University Students Win MOL Group UPPP Competition

MOL Group announced Wednesday that three students from the University of Miskolc in Hungary have won the UPPP competition, beating over 1,000 other teams from all over the world.

Team Oil Fnatic participated in a two-day live final event in Budapest, where the top five teams competed for a total prize pot of €25,000 ($27,446) by solving real-life tasks that face the oil and gas industry. In 2015, the number of participants in the UPPP competition increased to 1,114 teams, from 972 teams last year. Talented professionals from the best teams earned the chance to receive a job offer from MOL Group and kick-start their career with the 18-month UPPP Technical Placement Program.

Zdravka Demeter Bubalo, HR vice president of MOL Group, commented in a company statement:

“We congratulate the top teams for winning this unique competition and thank all participants for the energy and hard work they demonstrated over the past few months. Our talent acquisition programs prove that MOL Group found a successful and adventurous way to attract young talents, which help us to overcome the critical generation gap the global oil and gas industry faces. We are proud to see that we managed to increase the number of participants and for the first time we opened up the program to all the countries in the world.”

Commenting on its win, Oil Fnatic said:

“We still cannot believe that we won the UPPP competition 2015, but we are really excited. Competing with more than 3000 students from 53 countries was a great challenge, and we feel very honoured to be on the first place. We participated in UPPP to begin a real adventure and progress our future career. The competition proved to be a challenging and intense time, but we enjoyed working together as a team on the project and present our ideas to the audience. It feels great to be acknowledged for something we are passionate about.”

Geomatrix from the AGH University of Science and Technology in Poland was awarded second place in the competition and third place went to Next Oil Generation from the Middle East Technical University in Turkey.