Zak Kinsella

A PhD is a surprisingly difficult thing to pin down. For four years, it may be unlikely that your friends, family, and everyone in between will truly understand what you do. Indeed, for a few years you may not fully understand yourself – the aim after all is to pin down and falsify a particularly slippery question, one that has previously been unanswered or unanswerable.

Doubtless this can feel isolating and doubly so in a new city, a new country, and for such an intense period of study such as was my experience completing a large portion of my PhD through the COVID-19 pandemic.

RCSI, however, manages to bridge this transition with real skill. Being a relatively small institute with a focused and strategic aim in healthcare, you are immersed in an environment of researchers with a wide variety of interests and expertise in and around your field. This makes for a highly collaborative atmosphere, producing a tight-knit community of like-minded people.

Having also a university hospital through Beaumont Hospital in Dublin positions RCSI and your scholarship to be highly translatable. I have greatly benefitted from having clinical experts to leverage within RCSI, and this is an enormous benefit of studying here. The integration of clinic and research components is a genuine pleasure and privilege to have experienced during my study.

Altogether, RCSI is an excellent environment for furthering your research. It increases exposure to world experts, promotes multidisciplinary scholarship, focuses on clinical translatability and patient impact, provides for an incredible opportunity to broaden your knowledge and develop your career, and, almost as importantly, makes room for strong and lasting friendships.

Zak Kinsella, PhD graduate