Week 7: A nice quick trip to Nice, France
An introduction to the week
Hi -- Welcome back to Week 7 of Burke’s Bulletin! If you are new, my name is Connor Burke and I am from Wellesley, Massachusetts. I am interning at Dataships for 2 months this summer in Dublin, Ireland as well as taking a Irish Real Estate course.
After a long weekend, this week started off slow. My friends and I decided to lay-low and get some rest instead of staying up late in the city. Instead of late nights at bars or clubs, we began getting “Afterwork drinks” where we would go to a bar we haven’t been to and grab a pint before heading back to UCD. On Wednesday, I met Kevin Cody after work to go to O’Reilly’s Bar which is hidden in an alleyway next to the train station on our way to our bus stop. This place was awesome and had a lot of character. O’Reilly’s is also considered a Club which surprised me since it is fairly small. After doing a bit of research I found that it is a student hub for students of Trinity.
Internship Recap
During my internship this week, I have been working on Dataships’ social media by communicating with the VP of Marketing and Director of Content. I have been slowly gaining more “permissions” within the softwares Dataships uses and I am now able to post to all of their social media. I was the classic “social media intern” for a few days while the VP of Marketing was sick and the Content Director was on vacation. I then worked with Dataships’ Head of Go to Market and the VP of Marketing to revise some resources they have on their website and give insight into their paid advertising campaigns on LinkedIn.
Working with the VP of Marketing, I have seen that the majority of the marketing strategy for Dataships has been Paid Ads and word of mouth. They also have been working on their SEO for their informational blog posts which brings more potential leads to their website. I think that their paid ads are working well in gaining awareness of the company since the company is fairly new. Dataships marketing aims to provide awareness to companies so they realize that they need the Dataships software to stay data privacy compliant.
Something that I think can be improved upon in their marketing strategy is targeting agencies that develop websites for other businesses. Having them as partners could mean that they the agencies can easily convince their personal clients to integrate the Dataships software into their website. This would mean more passive sales (affiliate marketing) to customers and more revenue.
Some competitors of Dataships are OneTrust, TrustArc, Cookiebot, Solarwinds, and Vigilant Software. Dataships is different from them due to product features and their target market. Dataships focuses mainly on Shopify stores and provides an all-in-one strategy versus a singular focus which other companies do.
Weekend in France!
After the week of work, I traveled to Nice, France and Monte-Carlo, Monaco for the weekend!
The hotel in France was incredible with a spectacular view over the water and located in walking distance from the inner-city. What was amazing was that right in front of our hotel there was a small beach/swim area in the Ocean. We all immediately changed and went for a swim and the water was SO WARM. This water was actually bearable compared to the freezing water I had experienced last week in Bray, Ireland. After the swim, we stopped at a sandwich shop before going back to shower and I was able to get the highly anticipated French baguette!
We had an outdoor reservation at a French restaurant where the views were scenic. While the meal was great, the hassle of getting a taxi back to our hotel was a struggle. Uber and FreeNow were not working and all taxi’s seemed to be busy. After waiting 45 minutes, we were finally able to call one within the app. We were unable to figure out how to call a taxi service directly since the area codes were different. I need to get back to the simple +1 United States phone numbers…
That night we went to an underground club called Opera which was very cool but as you could assume… very hot. We did not stay long because the next morning we had to wake up at 9am to take a train to Monaco.
After arriving in Monaco, we walked around witnessing supercar after supercar.
As a group we “snuck” into a rooftop bar/pool on the roof of a hotel. By “snuck”, I mean we asked the hotel if we needed a room to enter and they said we did not. When we got up to the roof we were sooo out of place…
We could tell that everybody here was very wealthy and we were just average college students. The cocktails were a whopping $20 too! As you could assume… we only stayed for a single drink but the experience was still great.
We stopped by the Monaco casino but for better or worse, we did not enter because they charge 17 euros just to gamble! I thought this was crazy since most people just lose their money anyway. Entering an air conditioning gift shop, we stumbled upon the Prince of Monaco’s car collection. While myself and Kailey Kilgallon snuck in through the exit by accident, the others were able to find the public entrance since they did not want to risk getting caught. Let me tell you, these cars were absurd. I kept telling myself that one day I would have a car like them…
Pictured: Inside Prince of Monaco Car Collection *Photos by Kailey Kilgallon*
Our flight back to Dublin was delayed a bit but we were able to make it back at around midnight to get some rest before our Irish Real Estate class the next morning.
This class was great because Monday’s topic was about social housing. Our guest speaker was Rob lowth who works for the government and helps with social housing for homeless people. This class gave me insight on my paper topic that I am beginning to write on social/public housing in Ireland and the United States. With my luck, this class ended early even though this lecture was one that I had taken the most out of this summer. However, I am somewhat of a hypocrite because the other Irish Literature class had their class canceled and I had hoped mine would be too when I woke up early in the morning.
Some other info on the week
I love french baguettes
I got very sunburned in France since I forgot to apply sunscreen while at the beach
A policeman in Monaco yelled at us for jaywalking and said “This is Monaco” which we thought was funny yet very interesting
We went to a bar called “Boston Bar” (intentional) and a restaurant that was American themed (unintentional)
Some Local News:
Clean-up 'nightmare' after mountains of litter left behind by crowds at Dublin beach
Recently Dublin experienced what they called a “heatwave” which was far from a heatwave I have experienced in the states. While I was in France it reached 92 degrees but here it reached 91 degrees which is the highest temperature record in over a century. Due to the weather, everybody flocked to the beaches. However, so did the trash these people brought with them. This article describes the aftermath of all the beach goers and the amount of trash that was left on the beach. This article was important to me because last year I had written about the Garbage Patch Island in the Ocean. Knowing the pollution we do and the amount of trash in the ocean made me angry seeing how many people showed no effort to clean up after themselves. Their actions cost the city money (for the cleanup) and have numerous environmental implications. After reading this, I was frustrated because everybody is more than capable of bringing home their trash or finding a garbage bin instead of leaving it on the beach. This leftover rubbish was susceptible to winds blowing it directly into the ocean.
While I do not mean to end the blog on a bad note, this past week has been great. I finally got the rest that I needed during the week and was able to fully enjoy France. My current experiences here in Dublin has been incredible and has been very eye-opening to me as I experience different cultures. I have one more week left and I aim to make the most of it!
Video: Le Plongeoir Restaurant