Universities & colleges

Rachele Faggiani is the first-ever recipient of the Dublin Postgraduate Scholarship, co-funded and developed by Dublin City Council and Education in Ireland. We sat down to chat about her time in Dublin. What’s your name & where are you from? Hi everyone! I’m Rachele, I’m from Italy. I come from a small town called Tarquinia, just outside Rome on the seaside. Can you tell us a little bit about the course you’re studying? I’m a postgrad student at Trinity College, and I’m studying for an MPhil in

UCD Global: Welcoming international staff and students With a huge urban campus, state-of-the-art facilities and the largest student body of any university in Ireland, UCD welcomes hundreds of new international students every year and contributes significantly to Dublin’s diversity. UCD prides itself on being Ireland’s global university. And it has international campuses and strong links to academic institutions in locations as far-flung as Beijing and M

We sat down with Professor Philip Nolan, president of Maynooth University, to discuss his plans for the university, which lies on the periphery of Dublin. His role focuses on creating a strategy and implementing this to grow and develop the university. Maynooth University is home to over 1,000 staff and 13,000 students, and more than 1,200 of these are international students hailing from over 60 countries. The university offers a wide range of excellent academic programmes which are delivered by leading researchers in various fields, and students are challenged and encouraged to reach their full potential in this top-class learning environment. C

Professor Aoife McLysaght is one of the world’s leading genetics researchers. She is also a Lecturer in Genetics at Trinity College Dublin, as well as a past student. She speaks to Karl Whitney at Dublin.ie about her experiences of studying and working at the prestigious university. Trinity life, according to Aoife McLysaght The thing that I find interesting and exciting: new ideas and trying to figure them out. And that works better when you’ve got somebody to talk about it with. You learn from the experience of working with people who are

In a corner of University College Dublin’s suburban campus, archaeologists are building houses using thousand-year-old methods and casting bronze tools in fire pits using moulds they’ve made themselves. Brendan O’Neill, a PhD student in UCD’s School of Archaeology, has built a wooden roundhouse as part of his research. It took him about thirty days’ work over the course of ten months to complete. He wove hazel rods from a managed forest in the Irish midlands to create walls and a roof, which is topped with heather to help waterproof the structure. Inside the house, there’s a surprising amount of space. A central fireplace surrounded by s

Anyone for capoeira? Fancy an evening of food and drink? Or how about spending time with some serious Harry Potter fans? Universities and colleges in Dublin have a strange and eclectic mix of student clubs and societies. Yes, there’s soccer and Gaelic games, but what about caving and potholing or sepak takraw – a type of kick volleyball? Yes, drama and debating are to be expected, but

Imagine if Dublin had an instrument panel: a set of gauges and graphs that revealed to its residents the precise current state of their home town. Professor Rob Kitchin and his team at Maynooth did exactly that. And they built it, online. It’s called Dublin Dashboard. Dublin.ie: What’s on Dashboard right now that the ordinary person might be interested in? Robin Kitchen (RK): Probably the real time page where you can see how many spaces there are in the car parks or what the sound levels are or what the pollution levels are or how many bikes are in the bike stand, that kind of thing. The city is increas

Creative Writing postgraduate programmes have long been a staple of the academic world in the US. Prominent writers like Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace and Joyce Carol Oates have all worked as creative writing professors since as far back as the seventies. Yet, despite Dublin’s literary heritage and wealth of authors, it has only recently come to be recognised as a centre of excellence for such courses. Now, it attracts scores of hopeful young writers from around the world every year. UCD’s Masters in Creative Writing “You can’t teach people to be creative. You can only accelerate the pace at which people are developing creatively.̶

Irish folklore is all just leprechauns, legends and fireside stories, right? Well, not quite. If you go down to UCD today, you’ll actually find a very different story. The National Folklore Collection Back in the 1920s, Irish folklore collectors began to scramble around the country on a mission to record Ireland’s dying heritage and traditions. And that’s how the National Folklore Collection at UCD originated. Since then, it has grown into one of the biggest and most impressive collections of folklore and oral traditions anywhere in the world. It is the history that we don’t learn in school. The collection itsel

What’s going on at Dublin’s water research centre At Dublin City University, researchers are stepping up. Professor of chemistry, Fiona Regan, is the founder and director of the Water Institute which, in 2015, brought together researchers from across a range of disciplines to carry out research into national and global water problems. Why the world needs DCU’s Water Institute The devastating conflict in Syria was sparked by a water scarcity that pushed people into the cities and provoked unrest. The unrest in Yemen is rooted in a water crisis. Large parts of America and

Ireland is making a big impression on the international stage in terms of architecture; from the Grand Egyptian Museum to the University of Milan, we’ve left our mark on some of the world’s most renowned structures. Dublin.ie caught up with Hugh Campbell, Professor of Architecture at UCD, to find out how this small island is making such a big impression around the world. “It was an overnight success that took 30 years, in a way,” Campbell says. “We have a lot of great architecture practices here, and a very strong reputation internationally.” Architecture aside, the Irish are well connected globally. There’s more of us off the island than on, with huge cities like Sydney, London, New York and Boston all filled with first, second and third generation Irish.

What’s being discovered at Dublin’s third-levels? Postgraduate degrees are increasingly useful for people who want to stand out in the jobs market. Much of the focus here has tended to be on taught masters programmes, but the skills picked up during a masters by research or a doctoral (PhD) programme are invaluable: you will learn about how to research and evaluate information and then effectively communicate what you have learned. We spoke to four students about their research projects and what’s next for them. Lisa Koep, PhD candidate at the school of marketing in