CHEERS TO IRELAND

From nursing to biomedicine and hotel management, Irish universities provide a wide variety of courses for Indian students. By Jayant Sriram

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

University College Dublin ( UCD) is Ireland’s largest University with over 1,300 faculty and 17,000 undergraduate students.

UCD is the most popular University for Indian students in Ireland with about 212 students in the 2012-13 intake and is popular for science and engineering courses. Like Trinity College Dublin,

UCD provides undergraduate students in engineering with a range of options for funding. They are placed in paid internships and there are a total of nine scholarships awarded for students in engineering and business management which cover a part of the tuition fee. The university says that over 80 per cent of students are taken on by the companies they interned with full time after they graduate.

UCD also offers scholarships for specialised graduate programmes. “I chose Ireland for the employability factor and the fact that getting a work visa is easier. Some of my professors are world-renowned and the lab facilities here are excellent,” says Bhaskar Mitra, an MsC student in Food Science and Risk Management from Kolkata who is also a graduate scholarship winner.

UCD has also partnered with Trinity to invest in an innovation lab for which they have spent over a 100 million euos. “At

UCD you are taught all the skills you need to know to do well in a business but they also teach you how to become a good entrepreneur. That is one major differences between UCD and universities,” explains Pranav Narasimhan, 19, first year bachelor of Computer Science student from Chennai.