Before arriving in Ireland to do my Master’s degree at Maynooth University, I had a few questions in my mind about the process of moving to another country and about the course I had chosen. A few of them are listed in this post. Hopefully it can be helpful for prospective students:

– My course is full time, but I do not have lectures everyday – will I feel idle?

My course is based on continuous assessment, what means that we do not have tests at the end of each semester, but instead we have assignments. The thing is – sometimes one single module is split into smaller ones, so there were times in which we had two, three or even four assignments to do in one single module. This means that even though we do not have face-to-face lectures every day, we have a high workload to be done on our own, so do not worry about feeling idle at all.

– I will live in a town nearby Maynooth – will it be easy to commute to the University?

Before moving to Ireland, I was not aware of the housing crisis going on in the country. That been said, I recognize that I must be grateful for finding a place so quickly to live when I started the process of moving abroad. However, when I checked the neighbourhood of Kilcock at Google Maps before arriving, I thought it would be quite simple to commute to College, as it is just an eight minutes ride in the bus. The issue is that the bus can, very often, not arrive on time, which will make you spend way more time than planned on the process of commuting. Coming and going to the city centre in Dublin is also relatively quick once you are inside of the bus – but bear in mind that public transport stops working around midnight and just begin to run again around 5 am, so you will very often have to be rushing out of places in order not to miss your ride (or you will be lucky enough to make friends that can let you stay at their home).  

– I will really sufferfromf home sickness – will I cope well with that?

To my great surprise, I did not have huge crises of homesickness. Part of that can be explained by the fact that I talk to my family very frequently, so I did not feel I’m alone because they have always been there for me when I need them. Furthermore, I have met some amazing people that I now can call friends, with whom I spend most of my weekends and holidays. Not feeling alone is pivotal to make you feel comfortable living abroad and to help you enjoy your time so far from home.