IRELAND-DUBLIN

For my Erasmus exchange semester, I chose Ireland as my destination - Dublin to be more precise. The University College of Dublin, or UCD for short, is a huge university with many different degree programmes, from undergraduate to postgraduate to doctorate, you can do a lot at UCD.

This Irish university is gigantic. I lived on campus and studied architecture on the Richview campus. From where I lived, it took me about 30 minutes to walk to the architecture school without ever leaving campus. That was a big difference for me personally. UniLi's "campus" is quite small and it probably takes you 15 minutes to walk around it, whereas on the UCD campus it takes you at least an hour to see everything. Because of this big difference in size, there is also a big difference in the things you can do on campus. While in Vaduz we really only have a library, a canteen and sometimes the RED CUBE for our free time, UCD offers many different things. UCD has five different libraries with space for 700 students each, two free gyms for students, one being huge and also having competitive athletes, an Olympic swimming pool with saunas and hot tubs, a big cinema with the latest movies, four restaurants with different dishes, a food festival every Thursday, three grocery shops, about ten different cafes, two lakes, lots of common rooms and of course a campus pub called Clubhouse, which can't be missed in an Irish university.

Another great thing about UCD is the sports clubs and societies that help you meet new people and be more active during the semester and get involved in different ways within the university. I personally joined the surf club because I thought why not, I can't really surf in Switzerland/Liechtenstein and thought it would be quite fun if I went surfing in Ireland because I would never do that. That's what I thought of. The second club I joined was the mountaineering club. This one does weekly hikes and offers climbing courses, I thought it would be nice to start a new hobby with climbing and also it's really cheap to learn this way because you only have to pay the joining fee for the club once and then the courses are free. For me, joining the surf club was the best thing I could have done in Dublin. The first month we went on a three-day trip to the western part of the island. There were about 65 of us students and we had 12 houses just for us. It was the best time of the semester. On that trip I met my best friends who I became very close to and will probably and hopefully never lose touch with. It turned out that they were the people I spent the most time with.

In the beginning it was really interesting to experience such a big university as I knew it from the typical American movies. But as time went on, I also noticed the bad things that come with it. If you walk around our university at home and you meet someone, you most likely know that person, and if not, that person is probably studying finance, because in architecture everyone knows everyone, and that's one thing I really like about our university, it feels like a close community and with some people even like a family. At UCD it's very different. Every day I walked the half hour to Richview and saw new students every day that I had never seen before. So I thought the university was quite anonymous, which I think can be a good thing, but also a bad thing. I'm glad I tried a semester at such a big university and I really liked it, but I can't say which I prefer. Since I study architecture, the studio was pretty similar to ours. We had small classes and worked together all the time, so I didn't really miss the familiar.