Tom Curran, Ciara Dooley and Eoin Kendall of Castletroy College, Limerick, explain the year's ups and downs.
Ciara, Tom and Eoin here, reporting from Castletroy College, in Limerick. This could be described as a year for learning life skills and educating the whole person, which will prepare you for the Leaving Cert and later life. Does it work? It does sometimes.
Why did we pick transition year, you may ask. To be honest, most of us wanted a break from the pressures of exams. Who wants to keep studying for another two years straight? Also, many of us took the opportunity to start a new hobby. Eoin, for example, started to learn the guitar. Many people wanted to travel and try new things, and they felt transition year would be the perfect opportunity.
Lots of us are involved in putting on a musical. We're doing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It's the first year our school has decided to produce a musical, and we have to fill University Concert Hall three times - 1,000 seats for each performance - which is proving an arduous task. More than half of our year is involved in acting, singing and dancing; the other half are doing the interviews, the programme, taking photographs, making the set and other talentless things.
Our class is participating in a competition called Blastbeat, run by Blast record company under Robert Stephenson. We have to run a music company and organise a "battle
of the bands". We also have to promote and sell CDs of upcoming Irish talent.
We have been assigned individual jobs, and that gives us an insight into how a music company is run. We have a marketing team, for example, who have organised questionnaires, and we also have a web design team.
(Go to www.blastbeat.org/ie/
hellshippies to see more.)
One of the stereotypes of transition year is that we go on loads of trips and miss lots of school. So far we have gone on a few trips: one to Galway, for the film festival, and one to Kerry, for paintballing; we've also gone to a few career courses.
We have more planned, including a trip to Prague - a business trip, apparently.
Our transition-year programme is sorted into option blocks, to help us decide our career paths in later life. We take classes in psychology, architecture, engineering and web design, for example. Each class block lasts for about two months, and we have to do lots of projects for each one. These are graded in our end-of-year report.
We think transition year helps us develop socially and prepares us for working life. Some think it is a waste of time, although they are generally people who haven't done it.
The idea of the year is to help us get more points in the Leaving Cert - a benefit that has been proven by statistics. The main reason, apparently, is that students become more mature, more focused and more informed about subject choices. That may be the official reason, but for us it's the chance to doss for the whole year - and not regret it.
If you want to contribute to My TY, e-mail your piece (400-500 words) to gfaller@irish-times.ie
