Going to Ireland from South Korea

Sujin says:

I am from South Korea and I am currently living in London, UK. Before coming to Europe, I had been working for 3 years in Seoul as a nurse. South Korea is the second country with the longest working hours in the world after Mexico. Why did I leave my country? I was really fed off with the working life and I felt I needed a new adventure. So, I decided to move to Europe and my first choice was Ireland.

There were a lot of Korean agencies helping students going abroad. I wanted some help to prepare documents, find accommodation and a good school to start studying English and for this reason I picked one of the agencies to help me. The total cost for the service was circa 4800 euro (including first month of accommodation with a host family, 6 months of English course in Dublin City University (see: https://www.dcu.ie/) and flight ticket). If you ever want to go from Korea to Ireland or UK, please contact me: I will give you some good tips and make you save lots of money.

About my experience with learning English: When you move to a new country and you do not speak the language, everything is really hard…. Trust me!! Especally if your native language is not coming from any latin languages. Fortunately I have nice memories of my time in class learning English; I met so many people from wordlwide (India, Philippines, Chile, Spain, Italy, etc.) and many interesting people. One of them was Giorgio, my partner.

To work abroad (especially in the Anglosphere) as a nurse, you need to take an English test such as IELTS, TOFLE and OET (Occupational English Test for medical staff). You better choose a country first before going abroad and get information about English requirements. This will give you less stress for sure.

As many Korean nurses usually go to the US to work, I was unaware of the fact that I could work in an European country as well. Then, I found out about the English test, IELTS, which was a really pain in the arse during my journey.

Ireland requires quite high IELTS score (Overall 7, Reading 6.5, Listening 6.5, Writing 7, Speaking 7) if you want to be registred as a nurse; while the UK requirements are: Overall 7, Reading 7, Listening 7, Writing 6.5 (when I did IELTS, it was 7. It has been decreased from 2019), Speaking 7. Unlike the Ireland score, the UK score can be obtained by the combination of two tests with the constraint that the mimimum score for each task is 6.5. As you can see, there are slight differences.

I will write more about IELTS since I believe this is a huge step to be taken by everyone who wants to study in UK/Ireland and does not speak English. It gave me lots of frustration and desperation, but with patience (a lot of patience!) and determination I was capable of passing it. Let me tell you one thing: if you keep calm and you do not give up, you will eventually pass it.