It is crazy to think this, but as it turns out, I have been here over a month now! I cannot decide if I have been here forever or if it does not feel like it’s been that long.

I promised a brief overview of a typical school day, so here it is:

On the whole, the total amount of work here is very minimal. What I actually turn in for a grade per week amounts to one homework problem, one response to a forum, and a program every other week. The rest is optional. However, you are expected to do the work because if you do not then you are guaranteed not to do well in exams. But how much of the extra work you do is up to you. It is very self-driven and a stark contrast to Whitman’s homework-heavy curriculum.

The class sizes here are big. I have heard people that have closer to Whitman-size classes, but mine have between 70-100 people in them. It is a weird feeling to go into a class and not know if it is actually the correct one because you recognize no other students there. Each class has a tutorial component once a week, which breaks down the class into much smaller groups. The rest of the class times are lectures, with the exception of CompSci with exercise labs as well.

As far as teaching styles go, each class varies quite a bit. My CompSci class has two days of lecture, which comprises of a PowerPoint that can either be very theoretical or have actual code to learn; then there are two days of lab where we have an ungraded programming assignment. In maths the lecturer writes everything on the board, deriving equations and their proofs. In physics we are given weekly reading material to look at beforehand, and then the lecturer goes through a PowerPoint reviewing our readings and going into more detail; he also engages us by asking clicker questions. The common approach behind all of these classes is there are no required textbooks—they have different optional readings if we need more guidance, but otherwise the lecture material is their own. For me, this has been a very difficult adjustment, because I learn much better having equations and worked examples in front of me, whereas here I rely a lot more heavily on good note-taking skills.

Despite having little required homework, the students here are known for being very studious, simply because you have to be in order to earn high marks. They are also the people that work hard during the day and then go have fun at pubs at night, even during the weekdays. But that is far from everyone—I have had many people ask me if I do “nightlife” stuff and when I say no, they say, “That’s good, me neither.” The school is big enough to find someone else who has the same study-vs-socialize approach as you.

Wallace Monument View (Stirling)

Outside of academia, I have travelled to two places in Scotland. Travelling somewhere about every weekend, I have been told, is very much a study-abroad student thing to do, and depends a lot on your class schedule—the true students here do not travel nearly so often. I additionally go to two clubs, and have been to a cèilidh (pronounced kay-lee).

My first club is volleyball, which has been a blast, and the second group is a chapel choir. When presented with my choices of choirs to join, about half of them were chapel choirs. I have never sung in a chapel choir, so it is a very new and interesting experience, but fun. We learn the hymns and psalms the hour before we sing them live for the service. The choir is student-run, and only about ten people in all.

The cèilidh is a “social event with Scottish folk music and singing, traditional dancing, and storytelling.” We were served haggis, heard a Robert Burns poem about haggis and two Scottish songs, and danced. A lot. I have been told it is one of the most Scottish things I can do. This event was for the physics majors, so you can guess what a lot of the conversations involved. Everyone was very dressed up, and a few of the men wore kilts. There were about ten dances, almost all of which were very lively, many of which were in partners but quite a few were in groups of six or more. The steps are repetitive, so you learn very quickly, and many of them involve a lot of spinning. After the first dance everyone remained sweaty for the entire evening. The event ended at about 1:00 in the morning, with the final dance as one huge line of everyone swinging around with everyone else. The best part of that dance was because we were all physics majors, when we did not all fit in the room someone suggested angling ourselves to the hypotenuse of the room. That made the nerd in me so happy. I had a truly amazing time and am extremely glad I went.

My First Haggis (I Ate it All!)

On the whole I am enjoying my time here so far. That isn’t to say it’s been easy—the academic adjustment has been major for me, and I am still learning how to balance working too hard and not working enough with all this optional work. I am, in fact, rather despising my math class despite that being my favorite subject. There are times I feel disconnected from the people I eat meals with because they enjoy nightlife and traveling and I do little of either. But everyone is very kind, and I have made one good friend if not two or three. I love my CompSci class, and my physics lecturer is amazing. I have been able to travel and have had adventures with the ever-changing Scotland weather. Every day I learn a little bit more about my strengths and my weaknesses, and that is a good thing.

Cheers,

Brooke

I want to make the focus of this blog be the adjustment to a new social life at St. Andrews. In my next blog I will focus on the school system and how classes are going. Suffice to say for now that they are overall good but have very different learning styles.

Three weeks into classes is the time I have decided I am finally starting to get the hang of things here. However, the first two weeks of school were hectic, to say the least. My class schedule was not finalized until Monday of Week 2. There was a lot of confusion about the different student portals since no one ever explained that they existed. I had adapters confiscated, a fire drill at 6:45am, and was unable to do a single math problem on my first homework assignment when math is usually my strong subject. Since my room is right next to the shower, at 6:30 every morning I wake up to the sound of water banging in the pipes, which makes me tired. While I had a big group of other study-abroad students to sit with at meals, I found more and more that their interests both in class and outside of class were not aligned with mine: political and religious humanities, golfing, pubs and night life. For a long time, I felt more and more worried and scared that this semester was not going to be as fun as I had hoped, and I spent a lot of time crying because of that.

During this time I had to reassure myself a lot and sift through what was actually worrisome and what was just me getting caught up in the negativity. About two weeks in, this is what I decided:

Studying abroad, I believe, is not easy. That should not come as a surprise, since it is a different country and a different culture and a different school and a different food supply and a different everything. Nothing and no one can really prepare you for the way it feels when you actually get there. Some people can adjust pretty fast, find new great friends, not fret about the new academic system, and are just better about simply taking in the experience.

I am not one of those people.

I find the process of making friends one of the most difficult, terrifying, and worry-inducing activities someone could ever put me up to. I am rather shy and timid and not adventure-seeking. I am too organized a person to not fret about being uncertain of how classes work at the school I attend. I am also taking hard STEM classes that don’t allow for socializing every day and trips every weekend like others can do. Most importantly, I am a bit of a worry-wort who can get caught up in all the things going wrong when I get stressed. On the whole, I would not consider myself an ideal study-abroad student.

But this is okay. It is easy to feel lonely and disappointed when looking at all the other study-abroad students who hang out with each other, travel, go to pubs, and talk freely with new people. I wish I was social, extroverted, more carefree, a little more brave. But that is not who I am. That stereotypical “study abroad experience” where you travel a lot and go out with new friends often and try things you’ve never done before… that is just one study-abroad experience, and it is okay that it is not mine. I am the one who will be fascinated with the way a math class is taught in Scotland versus the US. I am the one who will talk about the random amazing clubs I tried out and not the random amazing pubs I tried out. I am the one who will talk about the two amazing friends I made in the last month abroad after being the quiet one in a big group of friends for the first three. When I come back home and talk about my time abroad, I do not think I will be proudest of how many sites in Scotland I managed to visit or how well I knew the town or how many new people I met. I will be proudest that I tried something new, that was not easy, and that was out of my comfort zone, but I survived. My story will be about building up my courage to believe in my own strength despite any hard times I may face.

Everyone who studies abroad will have to face their own weaknesses and fears, but in the end I believe what counts is that they persevered.

Written 22 January

Well, I have officially arrived in Scotland and survived the always-brutal Orientation!

The last few weeks before leaving for Scotland were rather hectic—full of appointments, multiple trips, learning Java, two trilogies I just had to read, and preparing for St. Andrews. The real chaos began the couple days before leaving for Scotland and the first few days of being in Scotland. To put it simply, St. Andrews is not nearly so organized as Whitman at telling you where things are online, what you need to do before arriving on campus, or how advising works. I definitely had on-and-off episodes of panic when spontaneously discovering something I had not known I needed to do. Despite all that, thankfully, I checked into my hall, found my way to all the Orientation events, and got in to the three classes I needed. I live in Andrew Melville Hall in a single room, which is a hall near the Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics/Astronomy buildings, which is ideal as the classes I am taking are Programming with Data (CS course in Java), Techniques of Applied Mathematics, and Electromagnetism.

Andrew Melville Hall

Since classes have not begun yet, most of the people I have met are other study-abroad students like me. In the large meeting where all of us learned about good academic practice, we discovered that we have people from Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, but of the 150-ish students about 80+% of us were from the US. The majority of the ones that live in my hall are all from the East Coast, but I have met a few others outside my hall who are from the West Coast. Also, while there are students studying in a lot of different disciplines, those studying International Relations or related fields are slightly more common, as St. Andrews has a very good department here. On the downside, this meant a lot of those students had to apply for their second- and third-choice classes as their first choices were full.

Both the students and the staff here are very nice and friendly, and they’ve done a good job of helping us meet other students in our hall and helping us get adjusted, which is expected but comforting nonetheless. Especially since we are only allowed to eat in our own halls, it becomes important to know the people you’re living with so you have someone to sit with. As far as exploring the town goes, there is not much to explore—St. Andrews is smaller than Walla Walla! From my hall, the edge of town is about a 15-minute walk, and the other end of the town is about another 5 minutes. There are three main streets: North, Main, and South. The main St. Andrews library and the theatre are on North Street, Main Street holds almost all of the shops and restaurants, and South Street holds the remaining ones. Many of the St. Andrews buildings are scattered around the town, mainly humanities buildings and offices like we have in Memorial.

Sunrise View from my Window

I am terrified, anxious, excited, and extremely ready for classes (or “modules” as they’re called here) to start tomorrow. I am greatly looking forward to taking only three classes after taking five last semester, and ones that should be really exciting for me. At the same time, though I have passed adviser consent to enter into these classes, St. Andrews will have prepared their students differently than Whitman did for the courses, which makes me nervous. While this is not such a big deal for humanities classes, it can make a world of difference in STEM classes, because you either know a theorem or you do not. I am worried I might find myself totally unprepared for one of my classes, but I guess we will have to wait and see. Here begins the adventure!

Cheers (they really do say that here!),

Brooke