Though I have loads to tell you about The Gaiety School thus far, I wanted to take a moment to travel back in time. I want to go back. To the breeze off the grey ocean. To the pop songs playing in an empty pub at 4 p.m. To the rainbow bushes hugging the land of a rejuvinating, Irish hike; up mounatins, valleys, and cliffs.
Wow life has been moving fast. I can’t believe I’m pretty much half way done! Here is a hurriedly assembled collection of pictures that I wrangled together between midterm study sessions.
So… classes really hit the ground running. I thought it would be a good idea to try to finish all of my exposés as soon as possible to free myself up to be less stressed later on in the semester. They would be done, out of the way, and I wouldn’t need to bother myself about them anymore. What I failed to consider, though, is that all the stress I was getting rid of for the end of the semester would be shifted to the beginning.
Seventeen weeks. That’s how long I have in this beautiful city. This is my fifth week living in Vienna, Austria and I can’t believe my journey is almost a third over! Last week was spent exploring Europe. I attended the week-long trip hosted by IES Abroad in addition to my own weekend excursion. I visited five different cities in three different countries! I got back from my trip on Sunday evening and started my regular-term courses on Monday! After having such a prolonged summer, getting back into the classroom feels right.
The French exposé is the French equivalent of the American "final presentation." It's the unnecessarily large and stressful project that every student dreads until the second it is over. The presentation is out loud, in front of the entire class and the professor and is supposed to last somewhere between 10 and 15 min. It requires a lot of preparation, a lot of research, and will make you feel like you're losing your mind. Hoping to avoid that, here are my helpful hint on how to survive your French exposés.
You know what they say: the first and last two weeks of your internship are the most important.
Okay fiiiine, I’ll admit that I don’t think anyone has actually said that. However, I do believe it to be true. Why? In the first two weeks, I meet practically everyone I will work with for the first time, and I get a sense of what the internship will look like going forward. The last two weeks allow me to finish on a good note and keep those relationship bridges alive and well.
One of the first trips I took whilst in Ireland was to Causey Farm, a quaint little Irish farm known for it's variety of animals, bread baking, and purely Celtic landscape. The IES Abroad students took a lovely bus ride in the countryside and before we knew it, we were in the midst of a perfect, traditionally cloudy day.
