Here Comes the Summer: My Journey to Teaching in Ireland

So you’re considering availing yourself of Ireland’s Working Holiday Visa (WHV), a visa designed for recent college graduates or current college students, and participating in CIEE’s Teach Abroad program in Dublin, Ireland?

Maybe you’re really passionate about teaching, travel, and global experiences and can’t wait to slap this eye-catching opportunity onto your resume? Or maybe you just need to get away for a while; maybe you recently graduated, and you’re just looking for a way to stay off the inevitable job search and big life decisions like whether to remain in your college town or go back home? Maybe it’s a bit of both? Or maybe you just have a penchant for dark, stout ale, interloping seabirds, and Paul Mescal lookalikes? I know I do.

Well, whatever your answer is, you’ve come to the right place!

Hi! My name is Kailash, and I’m a CIEE alum and a participant in the summer of 2025 Teach Abroad program in Dublin. I recently graduated with a bachelor's degree in journalism and mass communication, and I’m going to be writing about my experiences living and working in Dublin this summer here on CIEE’s blog.

How did I get here?

It was the last day of my nearly two-month stay in Dublin in the summer of 2024, and I and a group of sixteen other college students were all sitting around dark wooden tables on the second floor of a pub in Temple Bar, each of us fiddling with our fish and chips and half-empty pints of beer. There was no cheering us up. Even the most verbose among us had gone glumly silent. Our program leader spoke, wryly explaining that the last meal together was usually a silent one. There were some indistinguishable grunts and other sounds of recognition from the group.

I felt hopeless. I’d spent the last ten years of my life migrating from one city in the U.S. to another: Minneapolis, Portland, and Phoenix, and I’d never felt so at home in a city as I did in Dublin. Maybe it was just the awe-striking wonder of walkable cities, damp cobblestone streets, fresh sea air, and the adorable half-sized versions of pantry staples in grocery stores—the food spoils faster, no preservatives. But whatever the cause, I couldn’t imagine going back to Phoenix’s sunbaked, endless jigsaw of interconnecting strip mall parking lots, dotted with signs advertising stores where you could purchase both an extra-large stuffed crust pizza and an AR-15 in the same place.

“I just don’t want to leave,” I said, taking a sip of my Guinness and grimacing. 

I may have bent the truth earlier about liking dark, stout ale. It’s like drinking a viscous hops and barley smoothie. Regardless, you have to have one while you’re in Dublin, and the taste does grow on you, if only because it’s cheap.

“Well, we have our Teach Abroad program next summer,” my program leader said. “You can come back, and since you’re a CIEE alum, you get a discount,” she smiled.  You have to admire the sales pitch.

I don’t think she knew it, but in that moment, I had locked onto her words. This was my ticket out. My grey light on a misty day at the end of a scorching 110-degree tunnel.  My poor Minnesotan skin could not bear any more sun damage. I decided then and there that this would be my plan for the coming summer. So I returned to Phoenix, but when the fall semester rolled around, while ensconced in my drab, climate-controlled millennial gray apartment, I registered for the program—my ticket back to Ireland.

Getting certified to teach

CIEE offers a TEFL certification program online; this is what I took. If you, like me, have been a college student learning in a post-Covid educational environment, so you’re used to “hybrid” or exclusively online classes, it will be a walk in the park for you. That’s not to say the class itself is easy or you won’t learn anything, but you won’t have any issue with the format of the class, which is better organized than most professors’ online classes that I’ve taken in the past.

The most difficult part is the practicum. The practicum forces you to get in-class teaching time, either in-person or online, and apply what you’re learning in a real class setting with actual students.  Listen carefully now. Start it early! Do not wait until the program is nearing its end. Begin your required class observation and co-teaching hours immediately! For me, it proved to be much harder to find somewhere to complete my practicum than I had expected, as many places have restricted student and volunteer teaching since Covid, so start looking right away. You may feel early on the urge to wait because you don’t have enough knowledge yet about teaching; this does not matter. Most likely, you’ll be copying the teachers you worked with for your observation hours, and the rest of it is just a matter of throwing yourself into the deep end. You learn on the job.

Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork

You almost grow to have a certain respect for bureaucracy when you’re trying to obtain your visa. They make the process so streamlined yet somehow so tedious, but you can hardly complain because each step is spelled out for you in detail. Your only task is to collect the various items required and ensure they’re delivered to the correct address so they can be placed into the hands of the proper people. Then you wait and hope your block letter writing was legible.

But really, getting the WHV was pretty simple. I would still prepare your items and documents as far ahead of time as you can so when CIEE gives the green light, you’re ready to go, and all you have to do is mail those babies to your region’s embassy. It will make your life easier and give you some peace of mind during the preparation phase. It, however, will not save your nail beds from the nail-biting ordeal of waiting by the mailbox every day after you’ve sent your items, as I did, hoping and praying UPS didn’t accidentally drop your package on the tile floor of the embassy mailroom, where it would lie, unseen, collecting dust for years, in one of those fateful, life-altering blunders you see in movies. I watch a lot of movies.

When my laminated WHV, my passport, and my other original documents were safely returned to me by mail, I heaved a sigh of relief. Now all I had to do was wait...