Do better.

There was not enough staff in our program, they accepted 2-3x the amount of students they normally could and were not prepared for it in the slightest. They switched out housing after the payment deadline and then lied about its location to both the students and UF. They could not handle placing this many students at internships, and then when they were poorly placed tried to refuse to switch them. I was placed in an education internship, and worked with both FIE and my home institution for 4 weeks trying to get them to change it before I had to find my own internship through personal connections. This was extremely frustrating as I paid a lot of money to be given an internship that would look good on my resume, and going into my senior year I needed real life experience and once I switched internships it was still not perfect and I had only a few weeks left to gain experience there due to their delay and refusal to switch me. I am urging my home institution to drop FIE as a partner for this program altogether, as their a lack of organization was extremely frustrating for me and many of the other students on the program. I loved Dublin, and I love the students on my program, but I think FIE not only did not contribute to any of my personal growth, but it also made my experience significantly worse. They need to hire more people for sure, and seriously look over all of their policies that “prevent them from switching students internships” even though it is a mistake that they made and they need to fix. I don’t think I could be more upset and frustrated with how they acted during this program.