As a third year student at Trinity College Dublin I got the opportunity to study abroad this year. My abroad placement was the University of Otago in New Zealand. My first semester there was absolutely amazing - I met so many great friends and had the opportunity to travel and visit much of the country. I spent many of my weekends driving up to the mountains with friends to go skiing in August / September and also did a 3 week road trip around the South Island with my sister in November. I am so excited to go back for my next semester where I’ll be living in a house by the beach and one of my best friends from Trinity in Dublin will be joining me on a semester abroad. In between semesters on my summer break I am currently spending 3 months living and working at a ski resort in the French alps before going back to New Zealand in March. This past summer in 2024 before my year abroad I did an internship for a geography fellow at Trinity College Dublin and developed a prototype to teach climate mitigation and adaptation strategies to children in Irish primary schools. It was a great experience and I hope to continue my work when I return for fall 2025. Overall - an absolutely amazing first half of the year with great opportunities I can’t wait to see what happens next semester!

My second fall semester at Trinity College of Dublin in Ireland was full of new opportunities and great experiences. I got a lot more involved in the student societies and clubs offered at Trinity and joined the tennis team, boxing club, debate society, philosophical society, and the dance team. The best part of these was how they expanded my social circle and I met loads more people and made more connections that I never would have otherwise. Although the second year workload was significantly bigger I was still able to get away and do some traveling. I made it to Germany for Oktoberfest and camped on a little island off the coast of Ireland. Both were such invaluable and memorable cultural experiences. For my Christmas break I found a short term job in a ski resort in the French Alps and spent 8 weeks working part time and got in all the skiing I could. One of the best parts of this was when my roommates and I woke up early one morning and toured up one of the pistes at sunrise and skied back down before the lifts were open, meaning we had the entire mountain to ourselves! As a second year I had a lot more choice over the modules I could take for my degree. For example, I was able to take a course in the histories and futures of climate change which compliments my degree of Geography & Politics very well. Also picking up a French elective, I was finally able to work on my French skills again which I hadn’t used much since spending my gap year in Paris. Overall the start to my second year at Trinity was great and I am so looking forward to my next few!