Week 2: Getting Into the Swing of Things...
Updated: Jul 12, 2022
The week started out real rough with everybody dealing with unfamiliar places, public transport, jetlag, and settling into their apartments. This blog post may overlap with the first few days in my last blog post but stay with me since I need to vent about some of the hardships I had to face. Being in Generation Z, one of our greatest concerns is our phones. The beginning of the week was me figuring out the logistics of everything including my leap card, my sim card, my groceries, and my charging adapters. When checking in, myself and others were given a local sim card from the people at the reception desk. We spent some time trying to understand how to activate this sim card and add money to it with no avail. Then, we found out that we were given the wrong sim cards and a woman affiliated with Connect-123 had other sim cards in the same lobby/student center.
After finally getting service and figuring out how to use the local data plan, we had then set forward to figure out what this “leap card” was.
After a few google searches and some time getting lost following google maps, we were able to buy this coveted leap card at a small store named Mechanic on Duty. This leap card was important because it allowed us to use the public Dublin buses and easily “top-up” the card (add funds).
The morning of my first day at Dataships, my alarm was set early. I know myself and my trouble with directions so I made sure I had ample time to adjust if I made a wrong turn or took the wrong bus to my internship. I took the bus with Kevin Collier who is an intern at a company that is located in the same shared workspace as mine. My nerves were a little uneasy because we were provided a suggested route from Lea saying to take Bus 145 to the Science Gallery bus stop but we decided to take Bus 39A instead. Fortunately, our instincts worked and we made it with extra time to spare. I have been using that same bus all week but one day the bus showed up almost 10 minutes late and almost made me late to my internship!
The first two days at my internship at DataShips were just training and trying not to get in the way of the employees. The third day, I was brought into a conference type room by the CEO/Cofounder who gave me a short rundown of marketing and then the specific target market they are looking for. I then set on my first project which was to begin creating a lead list and cross referencing with the companies CRM software Hubspot. I got my own email and log-in to the different licensed softwares this startup is subscribed to. Something that I was very surprised about is when the co-founders gave me the go-ahead to purchase a $150 subscription to another technology software as a service that I personally found and was using to help with my leads. I was looking for ecommerce stores that utilize the platform Shopify as well as use the marketing service Klaviyo to target customers. This software allowed me to manually check every website I was on to see if they met that criteria. The software had a premium option which let me upload website lists instead of manually doing each one which the CEO and senior digital marketing director were both on board of using. I will still be continuing to work on my lead list tomorrow and communicate with their sales development representative in their California office.
After finishing the work I had planned for the day on Friday, I left to go back to Bucknell to meet up with our friends for our Friday night. We had a group go to the semi-finals rugby game and followed that up with going to a Bar named Flanneries.
This bar was a ton of fun and was a lot busier than the UCD student bar and the various pubs we had visited before. The next bright and early wakeup for the Celtic Boyne Valley Day trip was difficult. Fortunately, I was able to fall asleep on the bus and catch up on some sleep. Brooke and Lily were able to catch some Z’s too!
Luckily the Hill of Tara had a nice breeze which was able to wake a lot of us up early in the morning. However, when our tour at Trim Castle was delayed 2 hours, myself and Jack Romano took a brief nap at the local hotel lobby couches. We were woken up by the hotel’s management saying we are not allowed to sleep there but it was okay since we were heading out to return to the castle anyway.
My favorite part of the trip was seeing the sheep at Loughcrew passage Tomb. Me and Taylor LaMantia chased some sheep for fun but turned back after one of the sheep stood its ground and stomped its foot as we approached.
My least favorite part of the trip had to be going to lunch where I ordered a Ham and Cheese sandwich from a coffee shop and while waiting, Ben Mohan returned to the counter saying that his ham is blue. While that sight scared me, I was too hungry not to eat the sandwich.
Sunday was a lazy day where I was able to get some groceries for the apartment and finish Stranger Things Season 4. Monday’s class was another speaker which this time spoke about social housing and the involvement of the government with home ownership in Ireland. This was very interesting since the approach the Ireland government had about social housing (known as affordable housing in America) was very different from the government's involvement in America. This made me pay closer attention to the houses and buildings around me in the city, curious if the government was involved in its development. The speaker, Michelle Norris, touched upon how this home ownership and focus on housing was due to the farmers' generation who led large protests and were able to come together and make changes. One thing they did was refuse to pay landlords if prices were too high which made headlines. When visiting the Yeats Exhibit in the National Library, I saw a newspaper picture that referees to what she was teaching.
This newspaper was in a room that was talking about William B. Yeats life. He was a very impressive man who was both a poet and playwright. What surprised me the most was how successful his family was in the arts. I guess some things do “run in the family”. They all went into different art disciplines and were very successful with their prospective skills.
After the Yeats Exhibit, I went to search yet again to buy a laundry bin for my clothes instead of on the floor of my closet but was unable to find one.
Some final miscellaneous things that happened this week:
Went to a Noodle Bar which was very good
Ate lunch everyday with at least one of the companies Cofounders sometimes both!
Got very car sick on the bus at one point
Currently am experiencing an ear infection
Watched Top Gun Maverick at the UCD Cinema right before posting this blog (it’s incredible)
Met up with my friend from high school who is staying at UCD for different internship program
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One thing I read in the local Dublin news:
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2022/0612/1304375-asylum-seeker/
Asylum seekers are sleeping on the Dublin hotel floors for accommodations. The government is under a lot of pressure to source accommodations for these asylum seekers and are scrambling to find a solution. It is even more difficult since it is tourist season where many accommodations are already being filled up. This reminded me of the couch I was sleeping on waiting for our tour to start. It surprised me that the Dublin hotel is housing many asylum seekers but I was unable to sleep on the couch in the empty hotel early in the morning.