For 20-year-old Laois Rose Katelyn Cummins, being crowned the 65th Rose of Tralee 'felt like a dream'.
Fast forward a week, and Katelyn's Cinderella dress has been replaced with overalls, her heels with hefty boots and safety gloves cover her festival manicure.
After the whirlwind of the glamorous show, which is aired to hundreds of thousands all over the world, this dairy farmer's daughter from the village of Ballyouskill, on the Kilkenny/Laois border, is back working as an apprentice electrician, the only female on an all-male site.
'I've always been a girly girl - I love fashion and I was even considering going into some sort of design before I changed tack,' smiles Katelyn, who also turned down the option to study business at the University of Limerick to go into a trade.
While Katelyn is clearly as comfortable in a ballgown as Snickers pants, she's in a minority - just over 5 per cent of state apprenticeships are taken by women, and a mere 9 per cent of Ireland's construction workforce is female. Katelyn is hoping those statistics will change soon - and she is using her platform as a Rose of Tralee to encourage women and girls to look at taking on apprenticeships as career options.
'When I was in Transition Year, I really didn't want to go to college because I absolutely hated studying,' she admits. 'It was my dad who suggested trying a trade, as I'd be learning and working with my hands. I did a week with a local electrician and I loved it.'
Katelyn grew up on a dairy farm with her parents Noel and Siobhan and younger siblings Molly and Jack, and has been rolling up her sleeves for as long as she can remember.
'Being the older child on a farm, you kind of get given all the jobs to do so that your siblings can learn,' she says. 'I would have been milking cows, feeding calves, cleaning out the silage pit, all that craic.
'With farming, something can change in a split second so problem solving was a big part of it. I'd be very good at DIY too - that comes from my mum,' she says, revealing that mum Siobhan is a whizz at home improvement skills and imparted this knowledge to her.
Katelyn is now in phase three of her training as an apprentice electrician, working for Alpha Drives in Portlaoise. She says that she's got nothing but support and encouragement from her all-male team - although the initial stages of her journey were a little more challenging. Two years ago, she spent four months trying to find work but was repeatedly turned down by employers because she is female.
'It took me about four months to get a job because so many places that I did inquire about told me or my dad that the work was too dirty or too labour intensive,' she told Extra.ie. '[They said things like] "We work in a lot of tight spaces, she wouldn't like that", "we're down in sewage plants and she wouldn't like that", or "she wouldn't be able for it" - that was a comment that was said an awful lot. It really, really put a downer on the search for a job,' she said.
But today, although she gets the occasional raised eyebrow and is met with 'some surprise' at times, Katelyn finds that people are 'always encouraging' when she shows up on site with her male colleagues.
'I think more young women are going into trades but we really need to keep the momentum and keep pushing them forward,' she says. 'In the future, it won't matter when somebody says, "I'm a female apprentice", nobody will go "oh my God" any more, as it'll just be a normal thing. That's what most young women like me are striving for.'
In fact, despite the strenuous nature of the work at times, there's no part of the job that Katelyn struggles with - 'apart from lifting a heavy motor, but then a few of us would be doing that' - although she is considering future-proofing her career by possibly taking a degree in engineering.
'I'd love to have kids, so I'm thinking with all the physical labour when I'm older, maybe engineering might be something I could do to set myself up in years to come,' she says.
For now, Katelyn is concentrating on the biggest year of her life so far as holder of the prestigious Rose title, which will see her continue her apprenticeship alongside representing Ireland and the festival globally.
'I'm so excited about the travelling part, not to mention all the dressing up opportunities,' she smiles, the exhilaration evident in her voice.
Katelyn now has 31 new female pals, the Roses from Ireland and across the world, and she says that thanks to the competition, she's made friends for life.
'We all got along great,' she says. 'I really bonded with the Wexford, Carlow, Dublin and London Roses - I can see us being friends for years to come, the escorts as well.'
She adds that herself and her own escort Tommy Meade, with whom she also did her party piece - a lively jig - on stage at the Dome, 'got on like a house on fire'.
'I was thinking of doing a jive and then purely by chance found out that Tommy could jive as well,' she reveals. 'So then we practiced together and it worked great.'
For Katelyn, her journey to becoming a Rose was like a full circle moment. 'I really am so over the moon,' she says. 'It means so much - for me, and my family too.'
