A BID to get Limerick’s café culture to become a feature of the city later in the evenings, is just one of the things which a free new magazine is aiming to achieve for the September influx of ‘freshers.” Fourth year Mary I student, Michelle Costello, is producing a free magazine for the newbies who will descend on the city’s three third level institutions in September. “It will have a mix of articles and advice about college life. For a lot of students, this will be their first time away from home and they may not know how to go about things like setting up a bank account, budgeting or finding accommodation.
“We are hoping this will assist them and help integrate them into life in Limerick,” Michelle told the Limerick Post.
She says she has had enormous help and co-operation from everyone involved, as professionals and businesses, as well as voluntary organisations.
“I’ve had such amazing people to work with, people like the Local Heroes and Laura Ryan in the co-ordination office. It’s also about getting students integrated into the business life of the city and trying to get the cafés to open later in the evening.
“Students want somewhere to study in groups other than home or the library and if the cafés opened later and provided free wi-fi, they would meet in study groups in there”.
The magazine is called ‘Student Life’ and will be available from the first week in September in all of the student’s union offices and will also be available as an ezine on line.
Michelle felt that as she is going into fourth year and wants to produce ezines when she leaves college.
“I thought it would be an exciting challenge and as it has never been done before, what better time than now while we have the summer break?”
Michelle has been working with all of the students unions, and city businesses were recently extremely generous – as were the models – by donating clothes and time for a fashion shoot.
“Everyone has put in a tremendous amount of work and we are still looking for people to get involved as it’s a platform for people to highlight their work or add to their CV.It’s not about generating revenue as it’s a not for profit venture, but if any business wants to provide sponsorship, that would be great”.
Picture by Tarmo Tulit
