By Gail Batutis
Special to the BIR

Gerard Hanna and Nicole Quinn began planning their United States adventure long before they reached the shores of Boston. As undergraduates studying biomedical engineering at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, they were aware of the opportunity to work in the United States for their placement year to gain experience in their field of study. However, their hopes of simple applications and abundant job offers soon turned into a nightmare of “e-mailing, calling, and writing letters to over 100 companies in the US asking about the possibility of an internship but with no success.”

They worried they wouldn’t be able to get a job at all; much less their vision of working for one of Boston’s leading biomedical companies, but their luck changed after they reached out to the Irish International Immigrant Center.

Following their eligibility interview with Jude Clarke, Hanna and Quinn were referred to Megan Carroll, the Director of Intern Placements. There was an instant connection, “From the first e-mail we knew that we had met someone who shared the same ambitions for us as we did for ourselves. We were very lucky to have [Carroll], who supplied us with lists of contacts within our field that she had made from previous experiences. One of these contacts happened to be from Covidien, one of the leading medical device companies in the world.”

Carroll introduced them to two senior managers and the vice president – who gave Hanna and Quinn opportunities to apply for three openings. In preparation, Carroll worked closely with the two Antrim natives on their cover letters, resumes, and interview skills. Within a week, they were asked to come in for an interview. In Hanna’s words, “everything went brilliantly,” and in just a few days, they both had jobs in distributor rebates and tracings.

Hanna and Quinn are now “settled in a beautiful apartment in Mansfield, just ten minutes away from our new workplace. We are experiencing so many new things and developing our skills more every day. We look forward to these next eight months before we return home to Belfast, and are so grateful to Megan, Jude and everyone else at the IIIC for all of their help in providing us with this promising opportunity; setting us up for a very successful career in the future!”

With the help of the IIIC, these two hard-working students have no doubt achieved just the first of many dreams to come.