A Day in the Life: SA Software Intern in Dublin
A South African student doing a paid software internship in Dublin applies through the Atypical Working Scheme, which costs EUR 250 and must be lodged from home before travel. Here is what a normal Thursday actually looks like.
Lwazi is a final-year BSc Computer Science student at the University of Cape Town. He spent three months on a paid software engineering internship at a 40-person fintech company in Dublin's Silicon Docks. This is based on his account, written in his own register.
What does the morning look like in a shared flat in Stoneybatter?
The flat is in Stoneybatter, on the north side of the river, the kind of neighbourhood that used to be working-class Dublin and is now full of independent coffee shops and craft butchers. Three of us share it: a Polish data analyst, an Irish nurse, and me. My room is small but it is mine, and I pay EUR 850 a month for it. That number stopped a lot of my friends back home in their tracks when I told them. Dublin rent is the real cost of doing this, and there is no point pretending otherwise.
I cook breakfast most mornings. Aldi is a seven-minute walk away and I do one shop a week, usually about EUR 45. Porridge, eggs, fruit, coffee, the basics. A flat white at the café on Manor Street is EUR 4, and I allow myself two a week as a treat, not a habit. By Cape Town standards EUR 4 for a coffee feels mad. After a month you stop converting everything to rand in your head, which is the only way to stay sane.
How does an intern get to the Silicon Docks?
I take the Luas (the tram) from the Museum stop into the city, then walk across to the docklands. The whole commute is about 25 minutes. I use a Student Leap Card, which gives discounted fares across bus, Luas, and DART, and my monthly spend on transport sits around EUR 65. Compared to a car and petrol in Cape Town, getting around Dublin on public transport is genuinely cheap and I never think about parking.
The Silicon Docks is the stretch of the docklands where the big tech names set up their European offices, and around them sit hundreds of smaller companies feeding off the same talent pool. You feel it walking in: lanyards everywhere, every second ground floor is a startup, the whole area runs on software. For a computer science student from UCT, walking into that on a Thursday morning is a genuinely different feeling from walking into a lecture hall.
What does a software intern actually build?
The company is a fintech with about 40 people, building payment infrastructure for small European businesses. Small enough that I am not a number, big enough that there is a real engineering team to learn from. I was worried I would spend three months fixing typos in documentation. I did not.
By week two I had my first pull request merged into the actual product: a fix to how a transaction status was displayed in the merchant dashboard. Small, but real, in front of paying customers. By Thursday of a normal week I am working through tickets on the backend team, mostly Python and a bit of TypeScript, in a proper code review loop with a senior engineer who tears my work apart constructively and then explains exactly why. That review loop is the single most valuable thing about the whole experience. You cannot get it from a tutorial.
We run a stand-up at 10am where everyone, including the interns, says what they are working on and where they are stuck. Saying "I am stuck and I do not understand this" out loud, in front of senior engineers, and getting help instead of judgement, was a small culture shock and a good one.
What does it actually cost per month to live in Dublin?
Here is my real monthly spend. I have kept it honest, including the months I overspent on weekends. The euro amounts are what I actually paid; the rand column is an approximate guide for planning, using a rate of about R20 to EUR 1 in mid-2026, so treat it as indicative rather than exact.
| Monthly item | Cost (EUR) | Approx (ZAR) |
|---|---|---|
| Room in shared flat (Stoneybatter) | 850 | ~R17,000 |
| Groceries (Aldi, ~EUR 45/week) | 180 | ~R3,600 |
| Transport (Student Leap Card) | 65 | ~R1,300 |
| Social, eating out, weekends | 250 | ~R5,000 |
| Phone, miscellaneous | 55 | ~R1,100 |
| Total per month | 1,400 | ~R28,000 |
Rent is roughly 60 percent of everything. If you find a room at the lower end of the Dublin range, around EUR 700, the whole month drops accordingly. The single biggest lever you control is who you share with and where.
How does the lunch break work in a Dublin office?
Lunch is shorter than the long Spanish or Italian version you read about. Most days I bring food from home, which keeps the grocery line in the table honest. Once a week the backend team walks to a spot near the docks for a proper sit-down lunch, usually about EUR 14. Those lunches are where I learned how the team actually thinks about the product, what they argue about, what they are proud of. You get a version of the company you never see in the stand-up.
One thing I did not expect: how openly people talk about money and careers here. Colleagues told me what they earned, how they negotiated, which companies treat juniors well. Back home that conversation is taboo. Here it was just useful information, freely shared.
What happens after work?
Dublin is small and walkable, and the international graduate community is big. Through the company alone I met interns and juniors from Ireland, Poland, Brazil, India, and Nigeria in the first fortnight. Thursday evenings a group of us usually end up in a pub in Stoneybatter or the city centre. A pint is not cheap, around EUR 7, so I pace myself, but the social return is real. By the end of month two my network of people building things in tech was larger than anything I had at home.
Weekends I explored. Ireland is small enough that a bus to Galway or a train to the coast is an easy Saturday. I kept those cheap by booking ahead and not eating every meal out.
The honest part: visa, funding, and whether it was worth it
The visa is the part SA students underestimate. Because the internship was paid and integral to my degree, I applied through the Atypical Working Scheme. The fee is EUR 250 and it is non-refundable, and crucially you have to apply from outside Ireland before you travel. The two documents that make or break the application are the host company's offer letter and a letter from your university confirming the internship is integral to your qualification. Internship Abroad sorted the host letter as part of the placement; I had to chase my own faculty for the university letter, so start that early. Because South Africa is visa-required, after AWS permission came through I also applied for the employment visa, which you can lodge up to three months before travel.
On funding: I am partly NSFAS-funded, so I checked with my financial aid office whether the bursary continued during a credit-bearing placement abroad, because NSFAS funds the qualification, not the trip. Worth confirming in writing before you commit. I also asked my faculty about Erasmus+ KA171 (International Credit Mobility), which funds exchanges between European and partner-country universities including South African ones with active agreements. If your department has a KA171 partnership with an Irish university, that can carry a real chunk of the cost. Students on Department of Higher Education and Training work-integrated learning tracks should also ask whether any mobility top-up exists.
Worth it? Yes, and not close. I left Dublin with merged code in a live product, three months in a proper code review culture, a reference from a senior engineer, and a network across half a dozen countries. The rent hurt. Everything else compounded.
What I would tell other SA students
Dublin is probably the easiest first move abroad for a South African in tech: English-speaking, dense with software companies, friendly to international juniors. Just go in with your eyes open about cost. Share a flat. Cook at home. Start the Atypical Working Scheme paperwork and the university letter weeks before you think you need to. And once you land, treat the internship like a job you want to be offered at the end, because sometimes it becomes exactly that.
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