Mitchell Scholar Blogs

Coming into this year, one of the things that excited me most about living abroad was getting to experience holidays from a non-American worldview. Ireland certainly did not disappoint. Christmas markets play a huge role in the holiday season in Continental Europe, and the city of Galway brings a bit of the festivities to Eyre Square every December. It seemed like the entire city converged on the Square to celebrate the opening of the Galway Continental Christmas Market. Even the Taoiseach made an appearance at the tree lighting ceremony.

Decorations lit Shop Street, guiding pedestrians to the market, while a huge windmill, carousel, and smells of smoked sausage, hot chocolate, and fresh chimney cakes welcomed visitors. The Paulaner tent became my class’s social spot for the month, with hourly group renditions The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” serving as the season’s soundtrack.

Fortunately, I have wonderful classmates who have helped damped any homesickness I might have. The late-night football watching or ice skating sessions with them have made me feel like a true member of the community. But the holiday season has a way of making you miss your friends and family back home. Fortunately, my parents decided to make their first trip outside of the U.S. to visit this Christmas. After a brief stay in Dublin, we flew to Vienna and Budapest to get a firsthand experience of Christmas on the mainland.

Central European Christmas markets certainly do not disappoint. Craft vendors, food carts, and musicians fill entire city blocks and cathedral common areas. By far, the most difficult aspect of visiting one of the enormous markets was deciding whether I wanted a käsekrainer or goulash and trying to remind myself to save room for apple strudel or kürtőskalács. Aside from the markets, we had a wonderful time visiting Schonbrunn Palace, riding Das Wiener Risenrad, getting a bird’s eye view of the city from the towers of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and cruising along the Danube River.

After getting our fill of Central Europe and watching my father try to understand the conversion rate between U.S. Dollars and Hungarian Forint, we made our way back to Galway, where gale-force winds and torrential downpours helped us ring in the holiday season. Everything shuts down in Ireland from Christmas to St. Stephen’s Day, so we stocked up on food and made our own homemade Christmas dinner at my apartment. Sarah and Marian made the trip from Belfast to celebrate with us, giving us a quality Christmas with my traditional family and my new Mitchell family. Granted, the combination of Christmas market food and my mom’s dinner completely wrecked any progress I managed to make at the gym this semester, but at the end of the day, I’d consider it a successful holiday.

“You’re American, aren’t you? You’ve got some explainin’ to do.”

The teasing remark came from an old, avuncular Irishman at The Wellington, a corner pub near my apartment that I’ve dubbed my premier pint-sipping, people-watching venue in Dublin. The man then launched into an expressive critique of the revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program. He caught his breath momentarily before expounding on the political dysfunction that had shut down the U.S. government that week. And here I thought I wasn’t living in Washington, D.C., anymore.

I’ve experienced some form of this interaction many times during my first two months living in Dublin. In many ways, the Irish stereotype rings true: Warmth, charm, and humour have been cast my way whether I was gallivanting through Dublin’s bustling streets or strolling through Wicklow’s serene backdrops.  But I’ve been amazed at the Irish’s grasp of world affairs and enlightened by the stimulating conversation. Admittedly, a few pub anecdotes are not enough to make a definitive statement about an entire country, but these interactions have caused me to reflect on the value of cross-cultural exchanges and how they apply to my studies in higher education.

One of the reasons I applied for the Mitchell Scholarship was a desire to live abroad after foregoing that opportunity in my undergraduate years. The benefits of living in another country are incalculable. Leaving our homes and routines can challenge our assumptions and re-frame our world views. And as we return home, these lessons endure – informing our approach to work, learning, parenting, and other aspects of life.

This is one of the reasons why internationalization has emerged as a principal topic in higher education. Globalization and technological innovation have opened borders to students from around the world.  Universities are no longer just competing for students in their regions but also from distant shores.  Although this is largely driven by a wish for more revenue – many international students pay their own way — the impact on higher education is potentially far reaching.

Nevertheless, the percentage of international students at many U.S. universities remains small, meaning most American students’ encounters with them are limited. The out-of-pocket costs of studying abroad can be high and a lack of basic foreign language proficiency deters many U.S. students from pursuing overseas scholarships.

However, with global conversing accelerating over the Internet, there is promise that internationalism can flourish and be better integrated into college classrooms. Massive Open Online Courses seem gimmicky now, but some experts predict this trend will build into a disruptive phenomenon that changes the nature of higher education and keeps shrinking the world of learning. In the future, cultural exchanges will not only occur sporadically in foreign pubs but also daily in classrooms. For now, I think I’ll retreat back to The Wellington.

During my senior year of college, I got to know a professor from Cambridge who had recently come to the US, and we had many conversations about the differences between scientific research in the US and Europe. This professor often lamented the lack of creativity in American science, saying that the American way was to throw money at the question instead of designing sophisticated experiments to get at the heart of the problem. I’m not sure that I agree with such a stark dichotomy, but I certainly have been impressed with the creativity of the scientists around me here at Trinity. In many ways, I think the shortage of funding for basic science research here (and in the US, to a lesser extent) has led to novel approaches and techniques in the lab.

Personally, I’ve found my lab work to be very exciting and challenging. I’m working in a largely unexplored field, studying potential uses for adipose-derived stem cells (basically just plain old fat, of the sort that you could obtain from a liposuction procedure) as therapeutic tools for repairing spinal degeneration. Traditionally, scientists have used bone-marrow derived tissues in order to obtain stem cells for treatments, but obtaining bone marrow is a long and painful process that requires inserting a needle inside the hip bone and leads to an extended recovery time. For this reason, there is a growing movement of scientists who are trying to locate other populations of stem cells in the body, one of them being in the fat layers. This is a pretty cool idea because it could one day allow physicians and scientists to easily obtain stem cells from adult patients that could then be used to treat a variety of conditions ranging from Alzheimer’s disease to macular degeneration to some forms of diabetes.

The learning curve in the lab was pretty steep in my case as my background is in cellular neuroscience, so thinking like a tissue engineer doesn’t come intuitively to me. I’m very lucky that the Primary Investigator who runs the lab I am working in is a hands-on supervisor who has provided a lot of guidance and structure to my project, so I don’t feel like I’m treading water.

While I anticipated a challenging and intensive research project in the lab, I didn’t realize coming into the program how demanding my actual coursework would be. I’m in class for nearly 20 hours a week, something I haven’t done since my freshman year of college! However, I’m definitely enjoying the lectures and the new material I’m coming across. The Bioengineering modules I’m enrolled in are geared towards students who will eventually hold industry positions, working to develop novel biomaterials, surgical implants, etc. As an aspiring surgeon, I have always been interested in the biology of disease, but I hadn’t previously given much thought to the materials and devices that surgeons use on a daily basis. My course in Biomaterials has been terrific in this regard because it has forced me to think about the subtleties and nuances of the various materials (titanium, ceramics, etc.) that are commonly used in surgical procedures and how the selection of these materials can lead to drastic changes in recovery time and overall success of the procedure.

As a last note, a lot of the terms that European scientists and physicians use are different from the terms that are used by their American counterparts, which has led to some amusing miscommunications with other members of the lab. I didn’t realize that an operating room is called a “theatre” here, so I spent the first few weeks confused by why my boss was regularly leaving in the middle of the day to watch movies for hours!