A week in the Caribbean sounds relaxing, doesn't it? For the winners of the National Students Enterprise Competition, however, it was all work. The winners of last year's competition spent their holiday working in Denis O'Brien's Digicel in Suriname, and loving every minute of it.

Cathal Flanagan headed up the team that won the competition, and caught the eye of competition patron Denis O'Brien.

"When we won the competition in February, we thought we were off for a week in the sun," says Flanagan. "Denis O'Brien changed our prize at the last minute and gave each one of us a three-month placement with Digicel."

The students were happy to drop their summer plans and head for Suriname and Trinidad. Flanagan had just completed his business degree programme in Galway Mayo IT and was planning to go to London, where he had accepted a job as a stockbroker in the city.

"Instead I found myself in the thick of it in Suriname. It's a small developing country and Digicel is investing big money there, so there is real excitement surrounding the project. This wasn't the type of work experience where you lick stamps for a week. I was in at the deep end."

Flanagan's team-mate, Conor Moran, worked with him, while the other two winners Eoin Tighe and Dermot Healy, were sent to Digicel in Trinidad.

Flanagan is now working in London as a stockbroker but he plans to bring his experience to overseas economies in a few years' time. Doing business in the developing world was an eye-opener for him. "What I found in Suriname and Haiti were ambitious countries full of enterprising people ready to take on new ways of working."

Flanagan will never forget the experience. "As a graduate trainee, I couldn't believe where I was. I could never have got that kind of exposure without a competition like this."