Internship Placement areas
Dublin is the center of Irish industry, so you’ll be working with people from all over Ireland, and, very likely people from all over the world. The last several years have seen a huge influx of people from the new EU accession states – particularly Poland. This combined with the fact that Irish people are generally eager to travel and explore means you’ll find that Dublin is extremely cosmopolitan and international compared to U.S. cities of similar size.
Part of the thrill of an internship abroad will be discovering the differences in how you and your co-workers relate to each other. You’ll hopefully return with new perspectives and new ideas about how to negotiate in cross-cultural situations.
Below you’ll find brief descriptions of each possible internship placement area.
Advertising
Types of Advertising positions include:
Account Handling – Planning, developing and directing advertising efforts for a particular brand/client, analyzing markets, competitors, consumer behavior, advertising performance and buying trends to help agency understand the direction to move with client/brand campaign. Working with the account manager to facilitate the relationship between client and agency.
Media Planning/Buying - Understanding how media work, as well as how to plan and execute media decisions that are carefully coordinated with overall marketing goals and other communication efforts. Understanding how to evaluate the media contribution to a campaign’s effectiveness.
Creative - Primarily takes two roles - copywriter and art director who work together to devise ideas that develop into ads - be they press, TV, web, radio, etc. PLEASE NOTE: A CREATIVE PLACEMENT WILL DEPEND ON THE QUALITY OF YOUR PORTFOLIO.
Arts Organizations
Art organizations include museums, galleries, and organizations that display, sell, design, preserve, restore or help promote art and literature in its various forms.
The numbers of positions and organizations in this sector in Dublin are varied and include, although are not limited to, Galleries (Commercial or Private), Photography, Museums, Arts Libraries, Literary, Organizations, Arts Education, Arts Funding, Arts Administration, Historical Organizations, Art Trusts, Arts Workshops, Manuscripts or Archives Work, and Community Arts projects.
Business
Commercial business is a human activity involving exchange for wealth and satisfaction of both parties involved. Or as Andre Maurois once wrote, “Business is a combination of war and sport.” Business placements can cover a wide variety of areas including, but not limited to, accounting, company finance, customer relations management, economic and equity research, forecasting, fundraising, human resources, investor relations, marketing, nonprofit administration, management, operations, etc. Business placements are generally in-house and industry specific.
Film and Television Production
Although distinct from one another, production placements in film and television do share many common characteristics. Both are primarily based with small, independent production companies that are contracted to produce programming for the major television outlets or commissioned to make feature films.
The Irish film and television industries are very small compared to their U.S. counterparts and placements in production - i.e. on set - are difficult to find and impossible for us to guarantee due to the relatively remote chance of a film being shot in Dublin at the time of your placement.
If you are interested in a production-based placement, your chances of being offered this will be better if you are flexible about working in either film or television, and not exclusive to one or the other.
Financial Services
Dublin’s financial services industry has achieved global prominence in the last twenty years. The IFSC alone employs 14,000 people. While most of the major international banks and accounting firms have offices here, most of the work undertaken here is back office support for the major operations in Dublin. In addition to the banks themselves, other areas involved in financial services may include investment and fund management firms, venture capital firms, economic and financial publications, tax advisory companies and private equity research firms to name a few.
Health Care & Psychology
This category describes work involving anything from clinical medical placements to social psychology research. Any placement involving contact with a “vulnerable” population (children, the elderly, the disabled, the physically or mentally ill) is contingent upon a student’s previous experience and maturity as well as providing necessary police background checks from both their home state and the state where they regularly attend college.
We ask that students have a suitable second choice as we cannot always guarantee placements with direct patient/client access. Private practice counseling placements are not a possibility.
Journalism
Journalism consists of publishing or broadcasting news and information, as well as special interest feature writing and reviews of creative works. Journalists spend much of their time researching, writing, laying out and editing pieces for print or broadcast.
Types of Journalism placements include newspapers, magazines, E-zines and websites.
Law
Law is the set of customs, statutes, or rules that govern a society. The legal profession exists in many forms to interpret laws, defend and prosecute those who are accused of violating the law, and to administer any number of legal procedures necessary for individuals and organizations to operate within the law. The legal profession is varied in the types of law that one can focus on. Most placements on the program are undertaken in Criminal, Civil Law, Corporate Law, Human Rights Law.
Marketing
Marketing is the wide range of activities involved in making sure that a company is continuing to meet the needs of its customers and getting value in return. These activities include market research to find out, for example, what groups of potential customers exist, what their needs are, which of those needs the company can meet, how they should meet them, etc.
Marketing also includes analyzing the competition, positioning its new product or service (finding the company’s market niche), pricing its products and services, and promoting them through continued advertising, promotions, public relations and sales. Types of Marketing positions include Direct Marketing, Business to Business Marketing, Sales and Sales Management, and Market Research.
Occupational Therapy and Physical Therapy
Occupational therapy is the use of purposeful activity or interventions designed to promote health, prevent injury or disability, and to improve, sustain or restore the highest possible level of independence of any individual who has an injury, illness, cognitive impairment, disability, physical disability, or other disorder or condition. It includes assessment by means of skilled observation or evaluation through the administration and interpretation of standardized or non-standardized tests and measurements.
Physical Therapy is a direct form of professional patient care that can be applied in most disciplines of medicine. It provides a hands-on component, which can partner with physicians who have medical expertise in neurology, neurosurgery, orthopaedics, general surgery, family practice, paediatrics, geriatrics, rheumatology, internal medicine, urology, cardiovascular medicine, cardiopulmonary medicine, psychiatry, and sports medicine.
Politics: Non-Party
Non-party politics refers to organizations working in social, political and economic spheres that are not part of governments or political parties. They can be focused locally, nationally or internationally and include not-for-profit organizations, political consultancies, lobbying or research organizations or non-governmental organizations
(NGOs).
Politics: Party
As one would suppose, a placement in party politics means working for one of the political parties in Ireland. The work is typically based in the party headquarters in Dublin, with some opportunities to spend time in constituency offices and the Dáil. For most of the history of the Irish state, party politics were dominated by Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, both center right parties. In recent years, neither party has had enough support to form a government, leading to more influence for smaller parties such as the Progressive Democrats, Labour, the Green Party, and Sinn Fein.
Public Relations
Public relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. Public Relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behavior.
It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organization and its public.
PR placements will generally be either in-house or agency work. In-house will be within one specific company and will be run out of their offices; the majority of in-house PR placements in Dublin tend to be with not-for-profit organizations. The work will be focused solely on that organization and will be industry-specific. Agencies, on the other hand, tend to deal with many clients and are split into teams that deal with different sectors. For example: corporate, political, technology, consumer, lifestyle, business to business, entertainment (music, film, TV), non-profit etc.
Theatre
Theatre and the Performing Arts are a prized part of Ireland cultural heritage. Dublin has a vibrant theatre community of smaller production companies working on anything from big crowd pleasers to small avant garde productions.
Dublin has just three well-known, larger theatres: the Gaiety, the Gate, and the Abbey (officially known as the National Theatre). Most productions in these theatres (with possibly the exception of the Abbey and the Gate) are mounted by outside production companies, using the theatre itself as a venue. The real action is actually going on in
the more avant garde arts centres and newer performing arts complexes.
Students interested in the more creative aspects of theatrical production will most likely be placed with a production company or a smaller theatre or arts centre. Please note that this means you may spend a lot of time in the production company’s office and rehearsal space rather than a theatre building.