It’s the most wonderful time of the year, right? The Christmas lights on Grafton Street, hot chocolate with friends and trying to figure out what to get for your secret Santa. But yet, there seems to be something stopping you from enjoying it to its fullest – exams. We’ve all been there, sitting in a cold exam hall on a dark December evening, trying to write out that five page essay as quickly as possible, or remember that...
I remember my first freshers week really vividly – I felt a strong mixture of emotions, from anxiety to hope. I think the strongest feeling I felt was the sense of possibility, that my life would finally begin in college – I envisioned myself living the ‘perfect’ student life. In my mind, this included a wardrobe of trendy clothes, an instant friend group full of cool and intellectual people from all around the world, endless parties and social events, and...
Sometimes I worry that I’m a quitter. When I was 16, I went to the Gaeltacht for the first time. It was just 3 weeks long, I spoke decent Irish, and I went with friends. Somehow, my friends all took to it, and I just didn’t. It wasn’t so much that I was home-sick, I’d been away from home plenty before, but I just really strongly didn’t want to be there. And when my parents came to visit at the...
My first year of college was pretty terrible. Looking back, I can see that there were good moments as well as the bad, but at the time everything was just a blur of anxiety. I was obsessed with having the stereotypical, wild time that first years are supposed to experience – getting blindly drunk every night, having questionable one night stands, and throwing myself at any interesting opportunity that came my way. And in many ways I did have that...
