Education and St Patrick's day

How are all you guys doing? In Ireland everybody is very excited since tomorrow is St Patrick’s day. This is the national celebration day in Ireland and you can compare it maybe a little bit with Queensday. However according to all the stories this should be even better. As some Irish people told me ‘St Patrick’s day is the time to make the tourist think that all their prejudices about Irish people are true’. It is expected that more than 700.000 green people will infiltrate Dublin city center and will drink for the full 24 hours. I hope it is going to be crazy!!!  Luckily we are also free Monday  from our lectures to recover. 

Talking about lectures… Many times people ask me what actually are the differences in the style of education over here. More than I expected on beforehand, the style of teaching is completely different from the Netherlands. To give you an impression:

The information about courses is very old fashioned and unpractical. To give an example, it is impossible to get your personal lectureschedule on your Blackboard page. So it is like the first year of highschool. Get a hardcopy of the timetables and mark the classes you have and in which room you have to be.

Not only the information is old-fashioned, also the administration here is lacking years behind if you compare it to Tilburg.  If you want to register here for a course and its exam, you have to fill in a paper and hand it in at the Student Union department. Also handouts of lectureslides are not available on blackboard, you have to go to an external website to find them.  However, some teachers are very helpful and print the slides for you themselves. That’s what I call service;) 

 

Not only with printing, but also in general the teacher here are more involved with the students. They also know your name and greet you when they see you at the campus. Furthermore it is not a problem if you enter a class too late. Some kindness teachers at our university can learn something from… Also teacher take your input very seriously. One of the teachers ask every lecture whether the things he tells us makes sense, like we know:P. 

Next to the teachers, the learning style is totally different from the Tilburg as well. Almost every course here has a tutorial were you have to be present (because your grade depends for 5% on it and the teacher knows your face.) Like this is not enough, during these tutorials you really have to participate in discussion or even worse they ask you to give an extensive answer on the questions you had to do for homework. Preparation is sometimes a key word in Trinity. However, I notice that for me this is a very good trigger to do my homework. Hopefully this will pay off when I get my exams in may.   

That’s it for today! I’m going to prepare myself for the big Irish party tomorrow. Whether my expectation for St Patricksday were justified, I’ll let you know;) 

Greetings from Dublin,

Steven