Embarking my second week of Dublin, I have learned a lot based off my first week’s experience. Learning from the first week, I realized how important it is to leave myself time to walk to the bus stop. Some days I walk slower than others, but overall it is important to leave at least 10 minutes to get to the UCD bus stop. Another aspect of my mornings that I need to work on figuring out is my breakfast/eating schedule. I find myself sometimes having food in the mornings, but then the next mornings I forget to eat something before leaving for work.
This week’s work has been very interesting, I woke up Tuesday morning feeling very under the weather, and so I was able to work from home for the day. Today, being Wednesday, I had a trip planned with my internship but unfortunately due to a flat tire from a bus and a hold up at the UCD bus stop, with the addition of my tour’s bus driver leaving 5 minutes early I unfortunately missed my tour to Kilkenny. This has taught me the important lesson of sometimes being extra early for trips planned through my internship. Unfortunately, due to this week’s weather forecast, I am unable to go on tours any other days. This means I will not be able to go to the Irish Whiskey Museum this week. Additionally, this week, I have been doing a competitors’ analysis on competing companies. Through this analysis, I have looked started to look at the tours I take through a new lens. It is more of an analytical approach as I mentally note if the tour guide is doing a good job being informative, constantly talking, taking questions, and overall being friendly towards the customers. Touching on the bad weather for the week, I am interested in seeing how this will affect the amount of people going on my companies tours. I could find a way to compare my companies’ success in this week to that of the other companies.
In class this week, we discussed the 7-Eleven case study as well as the history of Guinness. To me, this case study was extremely interesting in that I learned a lot about a store I commonly see in California, but seemed to be ran differently. Since I have never really studied how a business operates, the operations of this company was fascinating. Their motto being freshness, but focusing on being quick and replacing their products often, seemed to be unique to SEJ. Overall, this week has been very fun with all I have seen, but also very informative both through work and in the classroom.
