6/15/2025 | Sunday
A lazy start to the week, the roommates and I stayed immobile until 2:30 pm, only stirring to make our pilgrimage to the beach. After the nearly hour commute, we walked onto the beach, and lo and behold, a red flag. Clarity struck me. Half of my job involves checking the water quality of beaches, and yet I didn’t think to do it before we headed out. We then spent the next thirty minutes debating the risks and safety of swimming during a red flag, but ultimately decided to stay out of the water. It was still a beautiful day by the water. We read, talked, and I watched the pools form as the tide pulled the water away from the shore. After a couple of hours, we decided to venture into Blackrock for some dinner. We had these huge bento boxes and then went to another place for dessert. I got an affogato, and we ate down by the ocean. Neila and I stayed by the ocean and watched the sun set. We saw two seagulls fight each other mid-air for a crab as well.
6/16/2025 | Monday
Back to work, Monday started very early, as I had to catch the low tide at 9:30 am in Sutton (around a 1.5 hr public transport ride). I was surveying Burrow Beach, as there had been a burst sewage pipe in March, and we wanted to check the status of the repair and if there was any more leakage. Luckily, the repair seemed to be holding, and there were no signs of leakage elsewhere. I noted and took a sample of a discharge coming from a different pipe, though it seemed relatively clean. After I finished up my fieldwork, I headed back into town to meet up with another regional coordinator for Coastwatch. She was very kind, and we talked about all things Coastwatch, as I was able to update her about a couple of initiatives Karin and I have been working on. After that, I got to participate in a yearly festival called Bloomsday, which follows along the route of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, set in Dublin over one day. I was chiefly there to observe and record any single-use plastic utensils (which had been banned since 2021), thankfully, of which there were none. This left me simply to observe and participate in the festival, as well as meet some of the friends of the regional coordinator I had met that day. After the festival, I ran to Trinity to drop off the sample and to finish up my field report in Trinity Lawn and Saint Stephen’s Green. One of the nice things about having a working cellular plan is that I can work wherever I like. I finished up work and met my roommates at Star Bar for some live music and food. It was very moody in there, but in a good, comforting way.
6/17/2025 | Tuesday
So, as it turns out, the tests from the samples need to be run within 8 to 18 hours of collection. When I dropped off the samples, I assumed the person who was doing the testing would be able to run them then, but he does not work on Mondays. So Tuesday, we headed back out to Burrow Beach to check on the pipes and grab another sample. The person I went out to the site with was a bit more familiar with engineering than I am (not hard), so we checked on the pipe again, and he saw some issues I hadn’t, so it was good that we had to go back out. We drove back to the lab, and he showed me around the facilities and some of the resources they had. I met a lot of PhD students as well. After a little show around, we ran the sample for E. coli. It was a different processing method than I had learned of before, so it was nice to get more hands-on experience with that. After we put the processed samples in the incubator, we broke for lunch and tea. Directly after lunch, we ran the sample for nitrate; this process was pretty much the same as other spectroscopy nitrate tests I had done, but with a different machine. After all our samples were run, I helped out in the lab with a bunch of random tasks, like changing out a compressed gas container. Lots of weird little lab knowledge I have now that I didn’t before. Because of our extra visit to Burrow, I made sure to set aside some time to edit my field write-up as well. Tuesday wrapped quietly, and I took some time to regroup after a busy day.
6/18/2025 | Wednesday
Working from home is tricky. On one hand, I love it, but I lose less of my day to the commute, but on the other, it does feel inherently less productive. Even though I work through the day, sometimes I have downtime that I know I could be using more productively. It’s a bit of a tricky thing to balance. I mainly worked on finishing the Burrow Beach report, as the test results from the E. coli came in this morning, and the field work was wrapped up. Additionally, I prepped for tomorrow’s outing, as I was shadowing a beach survey and looking at some seagrass. I prepped by learning species and evaluating satellite images from the beach. It was a beautiful day, so my roommates and I all agreed to meet in Saint Stephen’s Green for some outside time and conversation. One of my friends found a shell rather randomly, and she gave it to me to keep.
6/19/2025 | Thursday
You would never guess where I ended up this for a third time this week… Burrow Beach! Yep, my survey area quite literally included the pipe I had taken water from on Tuesday, so that was a bit disappointing in that I wasn’t able to go to a new location, but now I can say I am quite informed about Burrow Beach. I met yet another Coastwatch regional coordinator, this time for County Fingal. He was very nice and knowledgeable about performing surveys. It was cool to look at Burrow Beach on three different days, with three different viewpoints. The surveys are mainly focused on biological organisms, which was something I hadn’t been as focused on either of the other days. With this new information, I added a section on biological life to my report, then worked on some research objectives my supervisor gave to me. I worked in Blackrock, right along the sea, and then in the town center to try to mooch on some wifi. I skipped lunch so I could leave work early to run to Aldi, since it was in Blackrock as well. Neila and I had a chill night again, watched our show, and talked.
6/20/2025 | Friday
I had gotten my hours in this week between all the long travel to Sutton and working a bit over the regular eight hours, so I had no work this day, which was great, as it was finally warm and sunny. We got an email about an extreme heat warning; it was 78 degrees. After laughing a bit about that, I boarded the train to Howth, AGAIN (the train to Howth is how you get to Burrow Beach). We went to Balscadden Bay Beach. Every website I looked at highly warned against going because of the crowds, but I didn’t listen because sometimes things are a “tourist trap,” because they are awesome and worth it. It is an unfortunate thing to reconcile with if you are stubborn and annoying. The bay has to be one of the most gorgeous places I have ever been. It was beautiful even under the cover of clouds, but as the sky opened up, it ignited the greens, and they were nearly neon in real life. Pictures truly don’t do it justice. As my roommates trickled down to the beach, I read my book, called my boyfriend, listened to music, and–I will be honest here–played on my phone. We all brought sandwiches and chips and lay out in the sun. We swam and boy… it was insane. It was freezing when you first got in, the type of cold that makes it hard to breathe while your body acclimates. But after you get numb, it’s hard to tell where you end and the ocean begins. The cold makes the water saltier and denser, so it’s very easy to float on the surface. If hypothermia hadn’t been fresh on my mind from my conversation with a colleague at the EPA conference, I would have stayed in for hours if I could bear it. We went in twice, and it was great. After we got dressed in our warm clothes, we headed into town for ice cream (another affogato, if you can believe), and to sit in the sun. Then we headed to Mother Reilley’s and accidentally dined and dashed. Two of my roommates went back to pay, of course, but it was certainly a funny conversation on the bus.
6/21/2025 | Saturday
Neila and I woke bright and early for our journey to… Kilkenny! We had been during orientation week, but we only got an hour to explore, which we spent entirely on Kilkenny Castle grounds. The town, though, was so cute that we wanted to make sure we went back, so by the grace of God (fixing my settings), my alarm went off in a manner that actually woke me up. We hopped on our bus and arrived in Kilkenny bright and early so we could take our time exploring. Kilkenny isn’t that big, so having 10 hours there was more than enough. We got to see so much, but still did not feel rushed at all, and had time to just relax when we needed to. We did so much in Kilkenny that was the result of just walking around and going in places that seemed open to visitors. We started with, unbeknownst to us at the time, St. Patrick’s Cathedral (not that one) and Talbot Tower. Like I said, this day was just walking around to what seemed cool, and so I spent the entire day talking about how we must end our day with St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Talbot Tower, not knowing that we had started there. We went into a college as well, a hotel (oops, it was pretty), an 800-year-old church, Kilkenny Rose Garden, a restaurant on the river, and sat in many a scenic spot. We also visited the art festival there and got matching mini ceramic houses and some very cool art. Just walking around in Kilkenny was so immersive, it truly retains some of the old medieval charm, but it doesn’t feel kitchy. For some reason, we also saw eight brides or brides-to-be? Guess Kilkenny is a good wedding and bachelorette party spot.
Reflection on Internship | Hardest Cultural Change
For sure, the hardest challenge about adjusting to Irish work culture is how casual it is. This is probably related to my supervisor being busy as well, but I have never gone into a week knowing exactly what would be expected of me and when. On one hand, it can be frustrating and add unnecessary issues. For example, and this is a preview for next week’s blog, today (6/23), my supervisor and I had a miscommunication about what work we would be doing. She referenced “doing seagrass work,” which I assumed would be in field work. Because of this, I left my computer at home, as I usually don’t like bringing it out in aquatic environments. Unfortunately, when I got there, she clarified she had planned for essentially all our work to be on the computer that day. If there had been a more established schedule with some more detail, I probably would have brought my computer. While we ended up working it out and having a productive day, we most certainly lost some productivity to miscommunication. On the other hand, it does demonstrate a high level of trust, which I appreciate. I dislike being micromanaged, so sometimes I do enjoy that my supervisor just lets me figure out what needs to be done when, especially now that I have more of an idea of her expectations.