Amazing semester in Limerick

I studied at the University of Limerick for the spring 2018 semester and could not have asked for a better experience. The country, the little city, the friendly people, and everything in between made for a great 4 months away from home.
API did a great job to prepare me for the educational and the cultural side of my semester in Ireland. Myself and my other API friends were wayyyy more prepared than many of the other international students at the university in the sense of knowing what classes we could take and how their whole education system works. We also had Maria and Ger as our on site directors who were so so great about helping us with anything and everything we needed. They also took us on our API excursions and basically became our little temporary Irish family.
As far as the nightlife scene, Ireland has plenty of it, just not the most easily accessible. We had the bar on campus that was so much fun on certain nights of the week, and the clubs in town (40 min by bus, 20 by cab).
The University of Limerick was a really beautiful campus and in good weather just simply walking around is just truly amazing.
The thing about studying abroad in Ireland is that it is very different than studying in Barcelona or Prague. My friends and I noticed when we travelled and met people who did study in more popular study abroad spots that the people didn't get the same experience of their country as we feel we had. In Limerick we spent the first 2 months traveling all around Ireland on the weekends and it seriously felt like home so quickly. UL and API made that super easy and inexpensive to do which was great. Then we got to planning our own trips and still ended up getting to visit 8 different countries. Trip planning from Limerick was are difficult than it would have been from mainland Europe because we had to take a 2 hr, 30 euro, bus ride from campus to Dublin airport to catch cheap flights (Shannon airport is not the most useful). Still very doable and made us expert travelers.