An initiative with such a degree of autonomy as the Laidlaw Scholarship is unprecedented at the undergraduate level. The academic freedom it entails has offered me one of the most expansive and experimental learning periods of my life, and for that I can only thank the vision of the Trinity Employability Service and the Laidlaw Foundation. Without the trust they place in our individual creativity and ability, the exercise would simply not be the same.

Casting my mind back to January I can remember spending long hours in dark libraries exchanging ideas in my head, considering how best I could use the resources provided by the Laidlaw Scholarship to achieve a personal goal of mine. Soon into this brainstorming phase the path became clear.

On a personal level, I’m somebody who needs to sift through a large amount of information before making a decision. I thought back to choosing a third level course and the pains I went to in order to get something of an insider’s perspective into what was happening within the four corners of university buildings.

I attended shadowing days, spoke to current students across a range of disparate courses, read prospectuses, sampled learning material, took psychometric tests, browsed websites, engaged in guidance counselling, and showed up to open days, summer schools, and university fairs. After this nebulous window of information gathering, I was fortunate to pick a course that suited my needs and interests.

Reflecting during the first year of college, however, I realised that this whole process was a lot more involved than it should have been, and that the significant time it calls for is not something most 5^th or 6^th years have readily available. Why are shadowing days so hard to organise? Why is it not clear what exact modules I’ll be studying and what I can expect to learn in each? What are the people like? What will my surroundings look like every day when I move around campus? Why is it so impossible to simply get the vibe (sorry) of a course before committing four years of my life towards it?

I’m aware that every adventure starts with a certain degree of fear and uncertainty, however it gets quite draining seeing so many friends and family opt for courses that probably aren’t the best fit for them, year after year. Most students in Ireland sit exams in seven or more subjects for the Leaving Certificate; specialising in a single discipline at third level is not an obvious progression from the broad diet of learning that we are raised on. The idea of having six weeks to correctly identify the problem and attempt to offer solutions hooked me and after an engaging interview process, I was delighted to accept.

I was based in the Centre for Language and Communication Studies under the supervision of Dr. Ailbhe Ní Chasaide. From the very first day when I arrived with nothing but a Google Drive full of PDFs to read, I knew I was in the right place. Between a semi-anechoic chamber (for their linguistic research), a team with as many stories and personalities as there were PhD copies on the shelf, and a daily lunchtime lesson on artificial intelligence and the trials and tribulations of building language software for a minority language, this was an atmosphere of honest and open teamwork that dovetailed perfectly with my own tasks and goals.

I found myself learning marketing theory, academic best practice, and even web development simultaneously. After a period of note taking on the best available literature, I started putting my vision into some concrete form through organising video interviews with friends across a range of courses. One of my goals is to make it easy for students of a certain course to upload informal (yet respectful) videos outlining the simple realities of their college experience in a manner catering to the confused and time-starved secondary school student. Meeting with my ex-guidance counsellor reminded me that it is not open day reminder emails and trawling through CAO handbooks that help these students make their decisions, but rather the thousand small conversations they have here and there with a friend of an older sibling, a colleague at work, a teammate, a parent, a distant relative. These moments of judgement-free face-to-face exchange are when the college course selection process comes to life, and every effort should be made to adapt third level course information to this reality, to move away from stale text and towards a rich media approach.

As I move into my new life as an Erasmus exchange student in Grenoble, France, I envisage taking time to get a true grasp on the React web development framework in order to bring my ideas to a viable and usable prototype. I imagine in the future combining my efforts between a simple content management system and course listing and hands-on work providing marketing services to third level bodies themselves.

I have been thrilled to meet some incredible people on the Laidlaw adventure so far, and hope I can continue to surround myself with these people who push me to be what I am capable of being.