I have now been in Dublin for two full weeks, and I am loving it here. This past week, we went an Ireland v. Hungary FIFA friendly game after our first day of work. This weekend, I and a few other Pitt students took a spontaneous trip to Galway for the weekend. We spent Saturday walking around the streets of Galway and enjoying the folk music festival that was going on, and then Sunday, we went to the Cliffs of Moher which might be my favorite thing we’ve done so far. 

This past week, I also began my internship at the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) where I am working with the National Care Experience Programme (NCEP) team to improve health and social care services in Ireland through collecting and acting on patient feedback. I have been given my own project working on the National Maternity Bereavement Experience Survey. I am responsible for analyzing data collected from the review of processes sent to government, healthcare, and private organization employees to collect data on how the survey was implemented and how it can be improved in the future. I am working on a report to be published with this data. 

Because I have a project of my own and am receiving little to no supervision most of the time, it has been important for me to manage my time well. I am working from home four days a week, and its easy to want to take a break and lie down or go on my phone for a bit. To help me stay on track and focused, I try to break up my main project into smaller tasks and rotate through them to prevent boredom. Because I want to produce worthwhile results, I am also doing a lot of research as to what HIQA and NCEP have done behind the scenes and to understand every aspect of this project. After I finished analyzing a data set, I would switch to reading past reports or working on summarizing survey responses. 

This strategy has proven to work almost too well, and I am moving through this project much faster than anticipated, and so I am working with my manager to find other tasks and projects that I can work on as well. A few of my coworkers are planning on presenting data on the National End of Life Survey at the European Grief Conference in November, and I have additionally been tasked with creating the poster for them to present. Because I have already finished analyzing all of the data for the National Maternity Bereavement Experience Survey and am now only working on writing the report, it is nice to have a second project as well so that I can bounce between working on my report for a few hours and then working on the poster for a few hours. Because I am an intern, I also have various small tasks around the office to make other people’s lives easier like mailing out reports to various stakeholders and sending email updates to hospitals who are participating in any of the NCEP surveys. I’ve found that it is nice to have these small tasks every now and then that often get me up walking around the office or just doing work that is less mentally taxing. 

I have also been scheduling frequent check ins with my manager every couple of days where we discuss what I’ve been working on, what the rest of the team is working on and may need help with, and what my next steps should be. I am enjoying how much freedom they are giving me with my projects so that I can write what I think makes the most sense and is the most important, but I also appreciate having these check ins as most of what I am doing is rather new to me. 

When I do go into the office, I usually have a few meetings a day to break up my work. I have also made friends with a lot of my coworkers. HIQA is a very large organization, and even just the Dublin office has five floors, but everyone working on the NCEP team tends to sit in desks nearby, and so we can all chat about our projects as we work. I’ve also met a lot of people from other areas of HIQA at lunches, and everyone has been very nice. I’ve received many recommendations on what to do in Dublin and around Ireland from my coworkers.

So far, I am really enjoying my work. I am still working on establishing more of a work-life balance, but I have definitely got to experience a lot of Dublin while still working 9-5, and I am exciting for everything that I have planned coming up!