This week, we arrived in Dublin for the start of the program. This is my first time traveling to Europe, so I was really excited to experience the cultural differences from what I am used to. Right away, I noticed the weather was more rainy and volatile than what I am used to. On the first day that I was here, I walked with some other students to the grocery store, which is about a 30-minute walk from campus. In the time that we walked there and back, the weather changed from sunny to cloudy to rainy and back to clear before we got back to campus. When we toured UCD’s campus, our tour guide emphasized the same point; for Irish weather, on an average day you will need to have an umbrella and sunglasses.
Arriving in Dublin also meant getting to know my fellow Bucknell students who are also a part of this program. I only had met a few of the 29 other students before coming here, so it has been a challenge to get to know everyone, but I am really excited for the next two months that we will all have together!
On Monday, we visited the EPIC Irish Emigration Museum, which was all about how and why people left Ireland to live abroad while highlighting some of the accomplishments of the Irish who had left the country.
I learned that there were a number of reasons that people would leave the country and the life that was familiar to them, whether it was escaping the Great Hunger, leaving on a coffin ship that often had hundreds of passengers die before reaching their destination due to overcrowding and a lack of food and water, finding greater opportunity in other countries like England, or even to spread their faith across the world as missionaries, since Ireland was a predominantly Christian nation for much of its history. One of my favorite parts of the museum was their sculpture of the different methods of transportation that people would take to leave the country. Among them was the Jeanie Johnston, a ship now famous for not having any deaths as it carried passengers out of Ireland during the Great Hunger.
I also started my internship this week, which is with DC Automation, a company that makes electrical panels for other businesses. I am extremely grateful to be able to work with this company and already feel welcomed into their environment even though I have only just started there. I have also been able to learn so much throughout my first few days and have been able to start applying some of what I learned in school to real-world systems.
Figure 5: A lovely spot I found on my walk home from my internship by a different route through UCD