Kerry is a Study Abroad student from the USA. In her blog, Kerry walks you through how to create your timetable successfully so that you don’t need to worry!

Before coming to UL, you will have the opportunity to check the schedule of the various modules you preselected.  Personally, as a student from the United States, I was extremely confused about the whole timetable system. To help ease your transition and worry, I am here to give tips to understanding timetables.

First things first, www.timetable.ul.ie is the official site that has all the official module information. If you cannot remember the website, just type UL timetable into your browser, and the website is always the top result.

Once you’re on the website, click on the Module Timetable box to access the information that’s relevant to you. You will be redirected to a page that has a drop-down menu that says, “Please select a module:”.

From here, you can search the timetables for the modules that you’re planning on taking. Don’t make the mistake of scrolling through the long list to find your different modules. Instead, when you click on the drop-down menu, you can type in the module code. Once you select the correct module, you will be directed to a timetable from Monday to Saturday. Depending upon on the module, the timetables can vary widely. For example, a module could only have a lecture while another module could have a lecture, tutorial, and a lab.

Below are my top tips for understanding your modules timetables:

-Lectures are either once or twice a week. If you have two lectures, you must go to both!

-If your schedule has multiple labs and/or tutorials (TUT) in a week, you only have to go one tutorial and/or lab per week. As international students, we get to choose which labs and tutorial we go to. So, pick the labs and tutorials that work best for your schedule!

-If the labs and tutorials say they start in week 1, they won’t start until at least week 2 but email lecturers/tutors to find out. The emails are the same for every lecturer/tutor: firstname.lastname@ul.ie

There you go. I hope this crash course on module timetables will help ease your transition to UL!