Sarah Lewis

This summer, I was fortunate enough to work at The Gaiety School of Acting, the National Theatre School of Ireland, located in Dublin. Working at the Gaiety School has been incredibly formative. I’ve had a chance to try my hand at so many different elements of theatre, from writing a script for the Gaiety’s performance at All Together Now, a huge Irish festival, to location scouting for an EU Erasmus+ educational film project. I’ve gotten to act, to write, to stage manage, to prop and costume source, and to explore living and working abroad.

This internship has pushed me out of my comfort zone and helped me to acquire the resilience and courage I needed to take risks, take initiative, and explore elements of life and work that I’d never imagined before. Working at the Gaiety School this summer also finalized my decision to pursue the arts. I realized that writing, theatre, and music are incredibly universal, so that even when I was living in an unfamiliar city across the ocean from the country and community I knew, I immediately found a community of creative people to learn from and grow with. I’d never met people actively working in the arts before and being able to talk with them about their day to day lives and their work helped me discover which skills and experiences I should focus on acquiring before leaving college.

I know that working in this field is what I need to do, and I plan on dedicating the rest of my time at Stanford to honing the skills I’ll need to pursue the arts. Thank you so much for making it possible for me to have this experience. It has truly changed the course of my life.