From the Green Island of Ireland

Last days in Ireland. 3 months went by quicker than I expected. There was so much to do, see and experience, and so much was still left undone.

I came to Dublin at the beginning of January. First 4 weeks was spent studying Radiography in UCD. We had courses on Irish Culture and Cardiac Interventional Imaging. The first course was more about getting us Erasmus students familiar with Ireland, Irish Health Care System and what’s the role of Radiographer in Ireland. The course also included some trips and cultural events, like trying out Gaelic sports and a bus trip to Wicklow Mountains. The Cardiac course was an interesting one, as we don’t have a course specializing to Cardiac Imaging back at home. We covered subjects like anatomy, CT imaging, MRI imaging and Cardiovascular imaging in CV lab. The theory was interesting, especially since we had quite a lot of guest lecturers who were professionals at their own field.

After the month in school we had clinical practice for 7 weeks in a local hospital. I was in Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in Dublin. It was fun and interesting to see how the Irish health care system and Radiology department works. We had practice in several modalities, the modality was changing every week and sometimes even faster than that. It was great practice, although the role of a student is more like an observer here in some modalities. It was also very good opportunity to practice my English skills, although sometimes it was a challenge to understand the thick Irish accents… 🙂

My free time was spent mostly by traveling. I wanted to use the opportunity to see the country beyond Dublin, now that I’m here. So I tried to travel a lot. I went to see Cliffs of Moher, Newgrange, Hill of Tara, Waterford, Cork, Galway, did a roadtrip around Connemara… I also went to Scotland and visited Edinburgh, Inverness and Stirling. The pictures are from those journeys: