6/22 | Sunday
Tired from our long, arduous journey to Kilkenny (two hours by bus lets be real), we decided to keep our day light and simply plan one activity: a meal at CN Dumpling. See the girls had already done this week one, but I had decided to stay home because I wasn’t feeling well. To my surprise, they came back ABSOLUTELY RAVING over this place, of course, so since then we have been threatening to go back. We did and wow… let me tell you. It was worth it! The dumplings were, surprisinly, not my favorite part (considering the name). The thing that stole the show was the crispy chili chicken and squid. I do not understand honestly how they got the protein that crispy but wow it was fantastic. I got seven differently dumplings as well, and they were all excellent, except I was not a fan of just the veggie. Ok enough about the single restaurant, Onto Monday!
6/23 | Monday
My internship always has me on my toes, and this will become abundantly clear this week. On Sunday, my boss told me to bus to Wexford, and I would get picked up at the stop and then we would do seagrass work and possibly take a moment to swim. In my mind, that meant we would be doing fieldwork, and ergo, would not need my laptop. Silly. To my surprise, I arrive to her house; first shocker of the day. We sat on their porch and took a morning tea and biscuits while I watched her dogs play and her cat sit under the table. This made me realize how much I missed my cats, but it was nice to be able to see one anyways. After breakfast my supervisor tells me we would start doing some work… completely on the computer. I panic a bit and tell her I did not bring it. She replies, no exageration “That is really bad…. ok wow that is bad.” Every intern’s dream statement! I took some time to compose myself in the restroom then re-entered society and we began to work in a pseudo online pseudo paper configuration. It actually ended up working very well, and we finished up some edits on a map we are launching soon and some custodial work for the company. After we finished up our work, she showed me the beach by her house and we went for a swim. She told me all about the beach, its geologic history, and showed me some really interesting rock formations. After I got back, I made some dinner from my meal prep (thank you last week me!) and went for a nice walk. Then Neila and I wrote our blogs and watched Girls as a treat. We also stayed up to watch The Jimmy Awards and support Neila’s brother.
6/24 | Tuesday
A quiet Tuesday… I was working from home all day so it was just working on wrapping up some stuff for the seagrass poster and then researching for Karin. It was a bit fast paced in the morning, as we had lots of edits to do in a short time period. Work passed well, I was able to reschedule an outing to Wednesday because SURPRISE! My friend from middle school happened to be in Dublin! So I went out to meet up with her and we chatted a bunch. It was great to see her and see how she was doing. It is always fun when you accidentally end up in a place at the same time as someone. Our visit had to be short because she had family dinner plans, but that’s alright because I had to show my roommates (minus Neila, I will not perjure her like this) Derry Girls. I had to show them Derry Girls because SURPRISE (again) we were seeing a play with Tommy Tiernan in it the next day!
6/25 | Wednesday
Always an exciting day, I started off by doing some more work on the map then heading out to the Forty Foot Area to meet a lifeguard about the map launch we were trying to coordinate. The beach was beautiful, and I saw a seal on my walk there! We were able to get everything sorted out, and I took a quick walk around the area. It is beautiful, and I understand why it was immortalized in Ulysses. I then took the train back home, worked on the invite for the launch and, again, worked on the map. At the very end of the day, I got a call from my boss about some urgent statistics she needed for tomorrow, but I needed to be in the city by 6:00 pm so I decided to wake up early the next day to finish those up for her. The girls and I needed to be in the city for the play! We got drinks at the playhouse bar and then saw the show and wow. It was great. A very interesting and unique story about two brothers slowly descending into illness and madness living out of the caves near their childhood home while their sister, a Guard, tries to recover at least one of them. All the actors did great and it was an enriching experience.
6/26 | Thursday
Ok Thursday was genuinely a blur. It started very early, and with the impression that I would be working from home; this was absolutely not the case. After I finished my statistics from yesterday, I was waiting for further instruction, and trust me did it come. At around 10:00 am I received a semi-frantic call from my supervisor asking me to go back to where I was on Wednesday, scour the shore for seagrass, then travel into the city to meet her, ideally before noon. Only issue, I was not dressed (thought I was working from home!) and each trip is around 40 minutes to an hour depending on the train schedule. Also, to complicate matters, I needed my computer, which was incompatible with the fact that I was seeing Neil Young in concert that night and was actually attempting to leave early from work so I could make it to the venue by show time at 6:00 pm, which is about an hour away from the city center. Needless to say I FLEW out of the house, and darted to the DART. I arrived to the shore and began my hunt, but it was not fruitful and I would have panicked had the lifeguard from yesterday not been on his way to quite literally save the day. I was prepared to take my shoes off, hike up my skirt, and take to the water, but he arrived and offered to swim out to the seagrass bed and get some samples for me; eternally grateful. With a bag of seagrass and a prayer I headed out from the beach to the DART station again, caught an early train that Maps thought I would miss, and was in the city by 12:17 pm. While it was quite stressful in the moment, my supervisor’s gratitude honestly totally turned my mood around, and she called it “the relay of the century.” So why did we need the seagrass? Oh no biggie, it was just for the PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, Michael D. Higgy. I can call him that because she was meeting with him that day, and gave him the seagrass, and also told him about how I retrieved it for him. So the President knows about my struggle and that honestly did make it worth it. After my heart rate returned to normal (I have not ran that much since track), I retrieved my Trinity ID, found a little coffee shop, and started some work on the informational portion of the map. That was, until 4:30 pm when I started off towards the train station to see Van Morrison and Neil Young at Malahide Castle. Neila and I arrived at 6:00 pm essentially which was too early but. Does not matter! We got rained on also, no rain jacket, because when I fled the house–and when she rather peacefully left–rain was not in the forecast! Should have known because it was Ireland but. Van Morrison was good, overall could tell he did not want to be there but that par for the course. Neil Young was amazing! I hate to say but Harvest Moon was by far my favorite. It was even more emotionally moving in person; I was hanging onto every line. Overall a great show and made Neila and I forget about the fact we were soaking wet (it rained half the concert) and also freezing. We then RAN out of the concert, as we heard the train station gets very backed up after concerts. We pretended we were in a soccer game; as we ducked and bobbed and said “Cross!” to each other I was suddenly 12 again, at a middle school soccer game. So successful we managed to get SEATS on the second train out. On the walk home from the station, we saw a fox as well! A very very successful night.
Internship reflection | Soft and Hard Skills Development
Of the soft skills, I feel the one being most developed is adaptability; none of my days have ever looked the same. They often also are last minute, and really depend on what my supervisor needs. This requires me to be on my toes a lot, ready to pivot my focus or overall abandon something for the day and pick it up tomorrow. Another soft skill I have been sharpening is communication with strangers. I am not a naturally outgoing person, so i was nervous to learn my internship would include a lot of meeting new people. I have met so. many. new people. they’re all great, which definitely helps. What also helps is the fact that the relationship is so defined. This helps me in understanding the proper ways to interact. It also helps that I am a bit novel here; an american intern is an easy conversation starter. This helps in cross cultural situations as I am usually given a bit of leeway for not understanding or perhaps missing a social cue common here. In terms of hard skills, thy are mainly field techniques, writing summaries for reports (which are shorter, more brief versions of what I am used to), and certain lab processing skills.