Reflection back to March 4th. Sorry this is late, the last two weeks before Spring Break were a bit frantic and then I was off travelling for break.
I am officially halfway done with classes. It feels kind of weird. I am torn between feeling like I’ve been here forever and been here for less than a month. In the end, I think it feels a lot like your first semester at Whitman—a mix of trying to make new friends and figuring out how in the world the school system works. My main advantage is being comfortable in the college atmosphere already.
I am going to be honest and admit that the semester has not been going as great for me as I had hoped. I love my computer science class, but I am not enjoying my other two classes very much. Electromagnetism has a great professor but the material itself I find confusing, and my maths class is not taught very well even if the material is interesting. I have made one really good friend, and she is my hero for this semester, and I have many others to eat meals with, but I consistently miss my close friends back home. I did very poorly on my first physics exam. And gosh darn it all, they don’t even have Kraft mac ‘n cheese to make it all better!
That isn’t to say all of it has been bad, though. The weather here has been unbelievably beautiful. Given Scotland is supposed to be cold, cloudy, and windy basically until summer as far as I understood, it has been sunny for a lot of late February and March so far. I really enjoy the volleyball club here, with funny coaches and enthusiastic teammates. I have found the most delicious waffle restaurant here in St. Andrews, and it is all I can do not to eat there every weekend. The two places I’ve traveled to so far, Edinburgh and Stirling, were absolutely amazing. I have a chance to sing in a chapel choir, and last weekend I even tried joining another choir here, a community choir that is made up of St. Andrews students and St. Andrews residents, most of them elderly, and neither choir is one I would have thought of joining back home. I also got to participate in a badminton tournament against the other halls, which was really fun!
When I look at the big picture of my time here so far, it is easy for me to say it was not that much different than a semester Whitman, except that I disliked my classes more—but that is not really the point of studying abroad. For a lot of other programs abroad, the experience is probably quite different from Whitman, because of the classes you are required to take, or how a class is taught, etc., which I think makes it easier to not compare-contrast to Whitman and make yourself homesick. At St. Andrews, I have to remember the small things. Even if the classes are taught similarly to Whitman, St. Andrews offers a lot of opportunities Whitman never could have given. I get to travel the country because my homework load is lighter. I am meeting people from all over the world and hear at least three different languages spoken just walking to class. I am going to be attending an actual ball. My school is a ten-minute walk away from the ocean.
When I remember these fragments, it is much easier to put a smile back on my face.
Cheers,
Brooke