My name is Ethan Bresnahan and I am a current freshman at Drexel and now Dublin Business School I guess you could say. I am studying entrepreneurship, which is what I am focusing on while in Dublin, but upon my return I am also on a pre-med track. I am from Salem, MA just a forty-minute drive from Boston and I enjoy sailing. I was a bit apprehensive about going to Dublin for my first term, after all it’s one of the biggest life changes you can ever go through and I going through it across an ocean far away from my family and my old friends who might help me through it. However, my rationale was this; when you go sailing on a big ship and are feeling seasick sail out to sea to the point where you can’t see land, it wouldn’t matter if the land was just a half mile out of view or if it was 50 miles out, you still can’t see the land. It is a lot like this for me with Dublin, I figured it could be anywhere; Philly or Dublin and it wouldn’t matter because this new step is something that has to be new and something that I would have to face alone. So there I was at the airport, I said goodbye to my Mom and my sister, and walked towards my first flight, which as to Philly. It felt almost surreal, like everything I was doing was not actually happening, but when the flight took off and the sunset silhouette of the city vanished behind the plane I knew that something very significant had just happened to me. The flight to Dublin was daunting as there were more people from the Freshman Frontiers program on the flight and so we met up at the gate. The flight flew by and before we knew it we had landed and were already arriving in Blackhall Place, our residence hall for our term in Dublin. The first night we went out to a pub across the street, Mulligans, for an arrival celebration. The food was delicious and the group picked up right where we left off at orientation in July. Thus far we’ve been to two orientation sessions and we have learned that we start classes this coming Monday. From what I have learned from the brief interactions I have had with the professors, it seems that the heritage here is far more rich than in America, family lineages and where those families came from are celebrated and it is always encouraged, even if one does not have heritage in Ireland.
   On the second night, we went to dinner with the fantastic FIE leaders, Aoife and Feargus, and I sitting there talking to them I felt almost like a six year old. Obviously, having grown up in Ireland their maturity, the way they conducted themselves, their mannerisms all seemed so new to me as if I had never been to a restaurant before and in a way I hadn’t, I had never been to a restaurant and been in this new social situation and been expected to react the way that the Irish do. They tell you that part of study abroad is not only to see new cultures but see the similarities and differences between your culture and the new ones. What I have noticed thus far is that despite the similar language dialects it feels almost like everything in America has a slight deviation from that in Ireland and yet no matter how slight this difference is these differences transform one’s social interactions, their composure and almost one’s entire outlook on society. I will definitely have some things to report after tomorrow, we head out to a working Irish farm which should prove rather exciting! Wish us luck!