View From The Quad

Warning: If you do not wish to read an article which MAY feature in episode 110 of VFTQ, please do not read on.

I sit at my desk, drinking my first cup of good tea in three weeks. And I don’t want to be.

I want to be sitting in an overcrowded canteen at 8 AM, drinking overbrewed orange-twinged rubbish which I got from a huge vat. I want to be sitting at the very same over-crowded canteen eating undercooked chips, sloppy oily pizza and drinking water from a plastic cup. I want to be lying in the grass at ten to ten, holding somebody’s hand and laughing about something silly.

In short, I want to be in CTYI again. But I never shall.

For the past nine years, I have spent a portion of my summer at Dublin City University. Here, I have done college level courses over a short period of time. For the past four years, I have spent three weeks residential in the campus and done what amounts to the entire first year of a college course.

In 2005, I did 21st Century Science. 2006, Game Theory. 2007 brought Speculative Fiction Writing, and this year, I did an intensive course in Journalism.

During this course, I learnt about the many aspects of being a journalist. We watched films, documentaries and a writer for the Irish Independent explain the ins and outs of daily journalistic life. We created a 26 page newspaper entitled The American Pie. For this paper, I interviewed Paul Howard (Ross O’Carroll Kelly), made jelly in a bucket and even went to Dublin Zoo. The course was fantastic, Andrew Payne was an awesome instructor and it broke the really high standards usually set for CTYI courses.

However, it was not all about the course. Imagine this:

You are locked into a bubble with almost everything you need in it, along with around 249 other people. Here, hardly any news of the outside world gets in, and hardly any news of inside the bubble gets out.

The people in the bubble with you are all in the top 95th percentile in literature comprehension and maths. They wander around in bathrobes, argue about the validity of the Large Hadron Collider as a weapon and spend the entire three weeks pretending to be pirates. Crazy people. Fun people.

These are MY people. Geeks, Geniuses, whatever you decide to call them, they are fun to be around.

During Passionfruit, a little spoken of event for people who are too old to return to CTYI the following year, me and about 30 other guys and girls spoke, one at a time, about how CTYI has changed our lives. It was done in confidence, so I can’t share what others said. I can say what I told though.

I would not be this Cian Mac Mahon without CTYI. View From The Quad, Starting WoW, StuffSlasherSaw, my MINE submissions: All of these would not exist was it not for CTYI. 5 years ago, if you were to shove a microphone in my face, I would probably lash out at you. I hated being on camera, never mind editing my mistakes later. CTYI has brought out the loud-mouth in me, given me inspiration for short stories, projects, comedy pieces and articles. You would not be reading this right now were it not for the Computer Programming teacher who introduced me to Q-basic six years ago.

I would not have had the chance to meet all these amazing people were it not for CTYI. You all know who you are, and had I not met you, I would be a very different person. Some of you made me think about the bigger picture, what I want to be in the future years, some of you made me feel amazing and some of you are the best friends I could ever ask for.

This is all done now though. Never again will I be able to call myself a student of the Irish Center for Talented Youth. Never again will I drink the tea, eat the pizza and lie under the sky, next to the four walls we call The Quad, sharing the feeling with a friend. Maybe in three years I will go back and sit, nervous, in front of Colm O’Reilly as he decides if I am good enough to become a Residential Assistant and join the legion of the strange once again.