Work Experience 7th-11th march

I went to NUI maynooth for three days and two days in Dublin Dental Hospital for my work experience.
NUI Maynooth was great. I went with Jessica and another girl from Lucan. We were given different jobs to do everyday day mostly work to be done in the labs. In the mornings we set up the apparatus for the First Year students eperiments. This included putting down handouts on the benches, filling up bottles of chemicals that were required that day, cleaning surfaces and unlocking cabinets. One of the days we were given glass tubes to melt over a bunsen burner and stretched into long pieces of thin glass for an experiment. We all burnt our fingers :( We also watched the lab professors demonstrate experiments such as adding glucose to potassium which causes it to turn in to flames. Another day I was shown where the labs got nitrogen from and what they use it for. Overall I had a great experience and I consider doing chemistry next year.
The last two days I spent was in Dublin Dental Hospital. It was a different experience as I had to get the bus to town up and back on my own where else my mother usually drives. It was not hard to find my way to the place. I was given a dental gown ,a mask and goggles, that must be worn all the time as we were dealing with patients . Most of the time I observed the dental students work on their patients,some were doing fillings, crowns , pulling out a tooth ,tacking out stitches and examining infected gums. I was also taken down to the x- ray rooms to see how x-rays were done on patients. From my experience I think that this might be the career path for me but I learnt that this is a very hard working job as you start at 9 and finish at 5.


Eileen <3