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Currently undergraduate student Alžběta Kohoutová, CTU Prague,

ročník 2

About the country

Location of the place

Bolton Street (Dublin city centre)

City

Dublin

Surroundings (possible trips, ...)

Dublin city centre (churches, Guinness storehouse, Jameson Distillery, jail, War Memorial Garden, parks), Glendalough Park (reachable by bus, one day trip), Powerscourt garden+waterfall (one day trip, beautiful gardens+5 km walk to waterfalls), Howth (a village with harbour and many restaurants serving fresh fish), Bray (a village on the sea coast, possible 5 km Cliff walk to Graystones), Belfast (3 hours away), Galway (3 hours away), Cork (2.5 hours away, I recomend going by boat to Spike Island from there), Spike Island (great jail museum)

Employer

Dublin Institute of Technology

Work description

Assisting postgraduate students in research and projects, it depends what is going on at the moment. I was helping with research about concrete, also LCDs and beakers and Bluetooth signals (each for cca one week). Next to that I did some lab work (testing, setting and running experiments of several different products). In the meantime I was summing up research papers.

Salary (sufficient for local conditions?)

€200 per week, not sufficient - it did cover the accommodation (I had breakfasts and dinners included for €175), but I had to pay for the public transport (€30 per week), food etc.

Language requirements

good English is enough, one doesn’t need a perfect knowledge, but irish accent is different and iť’s very hard to understand people

Accommodation (price, who provided it)

€175 per week, I lived with a host family (8 people in one house, I had a private room), I got the website link from IAESTE, but otherwise found it myself. Host families are currently the cheapest accommodation there.

Social life

Meeting IAESTE members (pick-up at the airport, organized events...)

IAESTE Ireland has only a few members so nobody picked me up at the airport, but we hung out quite often (every week) and had many weekend trips organised (almost every weekend, it included trip to Cork, Belfast, Surf weekend). The members of IAESTE were great and very helpful and friendly.

Meeting other foreign students

IAESTE organized a meeting in a pub for us the week I got there and we got together then every week (together with IAESTE people). We also went for weekend trips together.

Sport and culture

I found a gym where I went several times a week, it’s not that expensive and gyms are everywhere. There are also pools. You can go to a concert or a theatre, but there are hardly any performances during the summer. There are lots of music and other festivals and you can find everything on the internet (type Dublin events)

Food, local specialties

Food is quite cheep in the supermarkets and similar to czech food. There is hardly any typical irish food, but some specialities are similar to the english ones, f. e. breakfast roll (bacon, eggs, black pudding and sausages) and Fish and chips. For cheap lunch I usually went to Subway or some healthy fast food. In the restaurants the food is usually quite expensive.

Other information

Possibilites to communicate with the Czech Republic

Thanks to the roaming I communicated with my family and friends as usual - phone calls, text messages, Facetime etc.

Recommendations for students who will go to the same place

Don't forget to make an appointment for PPS number in advance - you're most likely to need it in order to get paid

What not to forget with you

Umbrella, raincoat, enough money

Benefits of the internship

Diversity of work, I learned a lot of new stuff in many areas, also great language improvement

Cooperation with IAESTE in the foreign country

The members of the local committee were great and were taking care of us, they responded promptly to my messages and were very helpful

Overall experience with IAESTE

Very good, only I would expect the person with whom I communicated before my internship to be more helpful and don't leave searching for the accommodation to me (it was written in the O form that IAESTE will take care of it)