My weekend travel escapades aside, life in Dublin is going very well. I've been extremely busy. Much busier than I was in Madrid. I like to think of this as my slow easing back into the American lifestyle. Spain is much more relaxed than the U.S., and Dublin is somewhere in between. But never having worked a full-time job, this internship has been a great opportunity.
My daily routine consists of something like this: my alarm goes off around 6:30, and hopefully I drag myself out of bed by 7. That whole teenage inability to wake up early in the morning still hasn't worn off yet. Thank God my roommate wears earplugs otherwise my snoozing would drive her nuts. I leave my apartment to get on the bus around 7:30 and the bus ride is about a half hour, depending on traffic. The two other interns and I usually get to work about 10-15 minutes before anyone else, so we make coffee, clean up the office if needed and start work on the morning meetings. I actually really enjoy doing the morning meetings. We have access to some of the best databases in the world from UBS so I get to read a lot of interesting research and news articles in the process.
The working day consists of a variety of tasks, depending on what I'm working on at the moment. Some of it is trivial administrative work, but I've also had some stuff that's been really interesting. I've worked on rewriting/reformatting the business plan, helping arrange presentations for clients about their asset allocation, organizing a weekly newsletter with important financial happenings for our clients and setting up a client information database. I think the best part of the whole thing is that I work right alongside the CEO and Managing Director, who both worked at Merrill Lynch for over 20 years before they founded Kinsale. This whole thing has been a really great networking opportunity. I take lunch around 1 everyday with the other interns and we usually go to this AMAZING sandwich place nearby. On Thursdays, there's an international market with stands of every kind of cuisine imaginable. Looking forward to good food always makes the morning a little easier.
I get off work at 5 and head back to DCU on the bus. Unfortunately, DCU is a little bit outside the city so it's a bit of a commute (especially with traffic), but I'm usually home by 6. I detest the Dublin bus system. After being spoiled by the Madrid metro system, I get really frustrated with the unreliability of the buses and the indirectness of the routes. But I think that it's another interesting experience in living in a city. When I get home, I'm usually pretty much exhausted. I've been trying to exercise regularly, so I'll either go to spinning class or just take a run in the park at least a couple days a week. Then I typically have some kind of paper or reading to be doing, I make myself dinner, and I try to be in bed by midnight at the latest. On Wednesdays, I have class in the evenings from 6:30-9 which is AWFUL. Our professor is very understanding of how tired we are so she takes it easy on us, but it's still not pleasant. On Fridays we have the day off of the internships, but we have class from 10-1, so the day's not totally free. At least we get to sleep in a little bit though.
This is probably the most regular routine I've had since high school. During the semester at BU, my schedule is always erratic because classes start and end at a different time everyday. Some evenings I have volleyball practice, sorority chapters, other club meetings, or some social event. Then weekends are always crazy, busy, and ever changing. Even in Spain, I had class at noon two days a week and my internship at 9 two days a week, so my schedule was changing everyday. I have a whole new found appreciation for waking up early every morning and working all day. It's exhausting. However, my internship has been a great learning experience thus far so I have very little to complain about.
My class is going pretty well too. The professor is very laid back and relaxed, so the class isn't run quite as rigidly as I would prefer. We go off on a lot of tangents and fail to finish lectures and she's really bad about getting back to you about stuff. The longer I'm here, I find more and more things which are similar to Spain as opposed to the U.S. For example, we have that was supposed to be due on Wednesday July 6th. It said on the syllabus we would get the topics for the paper on June 15th. She then told us she would give us the topics on June 22th. She didn't actually give us the topics until June 19, giving us a week to write the essay and then she begrudgingly gave us an extra 2 days, until this Friday, to turn them in, even though she was completely at fault for not giving us the essay topics. This kind of disorganization is chronic here, and I find it to be much less common in the U.S.
It's interesting to see how other students who haven't been abroad before react to things like this or similar occurences in their internship. I guess I'm kind of used to it by now, and it's so much more mild here than in Spain that it doesn't bother me as much. A lot of people are getting driven nuts by it though. One of my friends was telling a story about how her boss was really stressed out and explaining to her all the thing that had to be done by the end of the day, so she said something like "ok, let's get started" and her boss goes "Well we need to have a tea break first!" Typical. Another story: one of my friend's had been sick for a few days so she went to the doctor. She came into the office, didn't have to fill out any paperwork, the doctor didn't even ask her any questions other than to describe her symptoms and then prescribed her penicillin without asking if she was allergic to any drugs (she wasn't, fortunately). One more story. A group of Italian high school students just moved in to the dorm we're living in. That's great enough as it is, but it gets better. DCU housing decided that it would be a great idea to give 100 foreign teenagers, I kid you not, MASTER KEYS. We had 15 year olds running down the hallway of our suite yelling in Italian. I'm not making this up. When we complained and explained how this was a problem, they just said that "they'd never had problems before." Unbelievable. This kind of stuff just does not happen in the U.S. The cultures are fairly similar though. I haven't encountered nearly as many frustrations here as I did in Spain.
That being said, I can't really imagine myself every living here either. A big part of that is the weather. I need sunshine. It is beautiful and Dublin is a great city, but there's no long-term potential in my opinion. Having been away for so long is starting to wear on me. The combination of seeing friends from home who I hadn't seen in a very long time last weekend, followed by the 4th of July kind of hit me with a homesickness double-whammy. I'm going to make the most of my remaining time here, by enjoying Dublin and going on two more trips - one to Northern Ireland and one to London, but I'm definitely looking forward to being back in the good old U.S. of A.
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