As most would expect, being in a different country, working and exploring is one of the most exciting adventures to be on, and this trip has done nothing but meet that standard. Although the urge to sleep in and reset after a long work week can be extremely tempting, and sometimes necessary. Catching a two-and-a-half-hour train at 6 am to Galway just to bus two hours further to see the Cliffs of Moher is the exact type of motivation I need to get out of bed and “sleep when I’m dead”.  Ireland, like many other places in the world, can and will be an adventure of a lifetime if you get out and do it, and that is exactly what I have been doing since I got here.

                  This weekend, my friends and I made a trip to Galway, one of the biggest must-visit places in all of Ireland. We were able to explore the Cliffs of Moher in some proper Irish weather that luckily opened into a beautiful blue-sky day. This transition allowed us to fully appreciate the beauty of the area before we moved on to seeing the Aran Islands. Unfortunately, it was an hour bus and an hour ferry to get there, but the freedom that came from biking around the entire island made the whole thing worth every minute it took to get there. We decided to go see Dún Aonghasa, a historic site on the Aran Islands with cliffs that rival the famous cliffs of Moher, and on our way to see it, we were able to stop and take in the full landscape of the island. When biking, we spotted a point on the island that overlooked a field of cattle and the ocean that we could not pass up walking out to. The whole thing was amazing, and now that it is all over, I am so thankful to have gotten out of bed and create these new memories.

                  Work this week has been a dream as well. For some reason, the more time I spend here, the more I enjoy the work I do. But it’s not that much of a mystery; every day I show up, I get to know the users more, and truthfully, I am going to really miss them when this internship is all said and done. At first, I was worried about getting tired of working in the field, and that’s what this internship was all about: discovering the things I like to do. But now that I’ve been here longer, the users have gotten comfortable with me and integrated me into their family at G5, and that’s what keeps me excited to be there day in and day out for them. But personally, building my soft skills and my ability to communicate with ID patients had also transformed the way I think about the field of medicine. I’ve started to understand that being in this field isn’t always about being “good” at what you do. It’s also about the time that you spend trying to build relationships with the people you are working directly with and learning about their situations.

Being able to connect with people is important… extremely important, and you can’t do that without soft skills. Unfortunately, you can’t teach this subset of skills; it all comes from experience and making mistakes. Since I’ve been in G5, I have made my fair share of mistakes. But thanks to the environment my coworkers have made in G5, I was able to move on and learn from it. I was able to learn how to communicate with ID patients because they let me fail and learn through the failures. I was able to create my own avenues for solving problems in the field of ID because they let me try and fail and then try again. They pushed me to develop and grow in the field of ID by simply letting me fail, and this is something that I plan to do for the rest of my life. I plan to create environments for myself and the people around me that allow them to fail and learn along the way. That way, when I am placed into new situations, like this internship, I can excel.