IGY Adventure and Leadership Immersion, Summer 2021

This was my second time with Irish Gap Year; I came for the Fall 2020 semester, then came back for the summer immersion program. I was in Adventure and Leadership both times. The summer group was much smaller (7 students between the 2 groups, as opposed to 15 in A&L alone), but as a result, we all got super close super fast. We also got to travel a lot more as COVID restrictions were lifted, which was great for experiencing more of the culture. The program is a perfect mix of outdoorsy adventure (hiking, surfing, cliff jumping, biking, swimming, kayaking, paddle boarding, climbing, etc.) and comfortable housing (you live in a big house with modern amenities). The leadership workshops are useful, but I think the most useful leadership experience comes from being student leader and planning the student-led trip. The schedule is pretty flexible, and all the staff are super nice, fun to be around, and hilarious! We do our own breakfasts and lunches, and usually someone makes dinner for us (Onóra is such a great cook). The daily programming is always so much fun, and we’re usually done with dinner by 6:30-7 and have the rest of the night off to explore town or go to the pub (nightlife is really fun in the cities and you can make friends with locals). You make lifelong friends here and learn so much. Even in A&L, we learn a lot about the culture and folklore and get to visit ruins of castles and other old buildings. If they don’t build it into the program, I recommend doing the Irish Dance Experience in Galway with Siobhan Manson. The country is so beautiful. Bundoran is such a cute town, and the amusement park is so much fun! There’s never a dull moment with IGY, and even the few times that were tough in the moment are fun to look back on now. One of the reasons IGY is special is that it’s a pretty small company, and there are only a couple of programs running at a time (as opposed to big gap year travel companies with 50 programs across 10 countries), so you get to really know the program directors and all of the staff, and they can cater to the students and listen to what we want from the program. I can’t recommend this program enough. (Shameless plug time: to see more of what we do on a typical day, look at my Ireland Instagram @ali.on.the.emerald.isle , or see my IGY Instagram takeover posts from July-August 2021 @irishgapyear !)