The SET Awards (Science, Engineering & Technology Student of the Year) are Britain's most important awards for science and technology undergraduates, and can really help your CV shine out in a crowd.

Supported by British Industry and Britain's leading scientific and technical institutions, they provide a showcase for educational excellence by publicly recognising the exceptional achievements of both students and universities. They are presented at a spectacular ceremony bringing together hundreds of technology students and academics, as well as senior figures from industry, government, science and the media.

We caught up with Marc Hull, winner of the IET award for 'Best Information Technology Student' to talk about his interest in IT, his winning project and his future plans...

"I've been interested in IT for as long as I can remember; first getting into computer games at school. I began to write my own and get really involved, but sadly I couldn't do any specific IT-related courses until the sixth form; although they now have a GCSE available. So I was self-taught programming from a young age (picking up some bad habits on the way!) and after A levels decided this was what I wanted to do at university which was great as they even managed to undo most of my bad habits!"

"My winning project was actually my final year project on my course at Imperial College, London. Entitled Balancing Simplicity and Efficiency in Web Applications, it was my attempt to simplify the development of web applications and optimise the way they store data in a relational database."

"The motivation behind it was that I worked for a company on an industrial placement one summer and they were doing consultancy work for banks, working on these large web applications; large internal/external websites. These things are much, much bigger than personal websites; getting content from all over the place, different data sources etc, and all of these projects they were working on were hideously complicated. Even doing simple little bits on them seemed hideously complicated because of the frameworks they were using, and that really frustrated me as I had to do so much work just to do some tiny little things."

"Scripting languages such as PHP or Perl offer a simple web development interface but sacrifice efficiency, whereas web application frameworks such as J2EE or ASP.NET provide static type checking and potentially greater efficiency, at the expense of being much more complex. My project idea was to try to improve on these issues, offering the best of both worlds by providing a simple web development interface for the Java language to and also performing automatic optimisations to make it efficient. My supervisor thought it was a great idea and helped guide me in a number of directions to make this possible. I started by focusing on simplifying the whole web development interface and when I got that nailed down I looked at how you could optimise the way the web pages accessed persistent data in order to make them quick to load."

"Then the idea was to package it up into a product that people could use, and so the aim was to get people to use this system where they could write websites really easily. In addition, it also had to be efficient, so there would be no reason to go back to using the old system; this was better in every sense."

"The project has been a great success and now I'm trying to get out and about getting people to use it and see how things go from there. I've even been talking to IBM about the project, and people there seem very interested in it, so I'll have to wait and see what comes of these talks."

"Now I've returned to my first love and my career dream, that of entering the world of videogame creation. I've just started my PhD, which is entitled Synthesising Game Worlds Using Computational Creativity Methodologies; basically a wordy way of saying generating worlds for games."

"I'll be designing cities for games of the ilk of Grand Theft Auto; large, sandbox worlds. The big challenge is to make a computer be creative! It's early days yet, but I'm really looking forward to how the work evolves."

"After the PhD I eventually want to make the leap into the games industry itself rather than just academia. Hopefully my PhD will actually produce something useful at the end of it, and some games company will think I'm good and hire me. This is probably when I'll become a full IET member; my parents are both in engineering, and so as a cheeky student I just read all of their magazines etc, but I know that it will be useful for me to sign up once I start my career properly. In the meantime, it's back to designing virtual worlds!"