University College Dublin here I come!
Well I am very happy to say that I will officially be going on exchange to the University College Dublin in the fall! I am thrilled about this for a number of reasons, the first being that an exchange is something I’ve always wanted to go on since I was in high school and found out about them. I remember ordering prospectus guides (what info packets are called in the UK) and trying to pin down which school I could go to. While I have ultimately settled on Ireland instead of England which I was looking at all those years ago I’m glad that I did. This leads to the second reason for why I’m thrilled about my exchange and that reason is because my dad is from Ireland and that makes me half Irish. I’ve always wanted to go see Ireland but I have never gotten to before so now I will get so see not only where my family is from but all of the other family that live there which I have never met. As an added bonus my family only lives about 30 minutes from the campus so I will get to see them a lot which will be very nice. At University College Dublin or UCD as it’s called I’ll be taking European Studies courses which I cannot get anywhere else, this ties great into my resource of human ecology and my region of Western Europe. I’m just in the middle of selecting my courses now which is very exciting as there are so many I want to take and it is unfortunate that I’m limited to only four as I can see at least fifteen that peak my interest right now. The other thing I’m going is waiting for the forms to come in so I can apply for housing, I am wanting to live on campus because similar to UBC, UCD is about a 25 minute bus ride away from the city center and I don’t want to have to deal with the commute everyday like I do at UBC, also the dorms there are night and day when compared to UBC dorms! Everything is brand new having been fully renovated this year and some even offer their own private bathroom for each individual room. The only downside is that they don’t have any ovens so cooking may be a bit tricky. Anyways that’s all I’m going to say for now but keep an eye out for blog postings in the fall sent from Dublin!