I’ve only been in Ireland for less than a week right now, and yet it’s already become one of the coolest experiences I’ve had in my Bucknell journey! I took off from Newark airport at around 9pm on Friday night Eastern time and arrived 9am Saturday morning Dublin time. Since then, I’ve been on a roller coaster of events, from checking into my room in UCD village, attending my first class, and completing my first couple of days on my internship. So much has happened in such a short amount of time, that I know it’s going to be a rewarding experience once I’m done!
On Monday morning, we had our first class for the semester for our course “Judging Justice”, which is a comparison of the Irish judicial system and America’s. In the afternoon, we went to downtown Dublin to explore the EPIC museum, which is a museum that highlights Irish emigration around the world, and celebrates the accomplishments of people who have Irish lineage. It was very hard listening to the kind of treatement Irish people endured in their diasporas after the Irish famine, such as working tirelessly building railways in Canada or in the sweltering heat of Australia. Nonethless, the Irish culture is brimming with pride all across the world and I’m very happy to have learned about their accomplishments.
On Tuesday morning, I attended my first internship ever with Dataships. It’s a Business-to-business SAAS firm that services Shopify stores with marketing insights and other useful tools. My co-intern Rayna and I met Christian, who is the head of RevOps – or Revenue Operations – and he gave us a deep dive on what they do at Dataships, what their business model entails, and what our goals are for the month and for the entire internship. He then gave us learning material to get acquainted with their CRM platform, called HubSpot, and we are excitedly on our way to adding value to their business process!
While the EPIC museum was a great experience to have, one of my favorite memories was going down to the river Liffey and spending a nice, relaxing time listening to music and enjoying the cool, Irish breeze as we waited for admission in the EPIC museum. There’s a lot of interesting architecture downtown, and there’s also a very cool-looking bridge that I can’t wait to explore further.
Another cool experience I’ve had was going to Grafton street, which is a nice shopping plaza in Dublin. I was trying to get my Swatch fixed, because I noticed that it was broken, but I got to the store 20 minutes past closing. As unfortunate as that was, I enjoyed the bustling atmosphere of shoppers and tourists, and the live street music was very nice to listen to. I’m very glad to find that Dublin is a city with lots of historic charm, but it also has a lot of commerce and entertainment to offer. I can’t wait to explore the city more in-depth in the coming weeks!