In my first semester of my freshman year at Northeastern, I flew to Ireland to study at the University College of Dublin. My academic focus at the time was psychology, but I took a survey of classes, including philosophy, folklore, and my general writing requirements. While there I also played frisbee on the club team and spent a ton of time traveling around the country, seeing as much as I could and getting to know locals.
UCD was my first interaction with the college lifestyle, and it was definitely a culture shock - getting used to such a different schedule while living in another continent was a big adjustment. I took to it with gusto, though, and loved my time there. It was a period of immense growth and left me with a lot of close friends coming back to the Boston campus.
It was also at UCD that I started my college chrysalis phase, in which I made a series of realizations about what I wanted to study and do with my time. In the three semesters following my time in Ireland, I changed my major three times - from psychology to business, from business to symbolic systems, and finally a simplification to computer science and philosophy. Understanding how much I loved technical puzzles and taking on challenging questions was an important shift for me, and I can’t imagine having spent the last four years of my life studying a ‘fuzzy’ topic rather than the more intense education I’ve gone through at the hands of the Khoury College of CS.
UCD was a transformation for me, and I’m always excited to go back to Ireland and take it in with a new lens now that I’ve grown so far past who I was during my time there.