This term 13 students from Transition Year were asked to attend a Trinity College workshop called Scholars Ireland. Scholars Ireland is a programme designed to give pupils an authentic experience of university. The course is taught by PhD tutors, and it gave us students an opportunity to study undergraduate- style topics with a unique subject. Scholars Ireland aims to help prepare secondary school students for third level coursework and in doing so it breaks down barriers to university that some students may face.
There were a range of different modules to choose from and the one I participated in was the religion module. In this module I learned about The Divine Comedy (Dante’s Inferno) written by Dante Alighieri. Dante Alighieri, was an Italian poet and I loved the opportunity to get to learn about his writing.
Over the course of 6 weeks our tutor, Lydia Blake, taught us about Dante’s early life and we also studied a select few passages (Canto’s) from The Divine Comedy. We learned about different punishments and sins committed in Dante’s Inferno and also about Dante’s perspective about the state versus church debate. At the end of the 6 weeks, we had to write an essay. The topic of the essay was ‘Justice in The Life of The Wicked’ and it had to be 1,000-1,500 words long.
I enjoyed the programme as it was informative, fun and has also given me an insight into college life and I would highly recommend to students at my school as I have taken away some valuable college and life skills.
By: Abbie Slye.