Welcome to the Blog

Hi, I'm Thomas and I'm about to enter my second year at the University of St Andrews. I study in the School of Physics and Astronomy for a MPhys degree in Astrophysics. For the last year I've lived in University Hall where I'm going to be returning this year.

In this blog I'm going to try and offer my experiences and advice for all incoming students to the university and tell you a bit about my experiences at the university and in the town of St Andrews. I'll try to keep the updates regular and if you have any questions feel free to comment below and I'll try and give the best answers I can in the next post.

With that out of the way I'll tell you a little about myself. I'm from a small town called Bonnybridge, near Falkirk in Central Scotland. I started in St Andrews in September 2018 entering into first year (not direct entry) of the MPhys Astrophysics course. I came to the uni knowing only one person who'd come from the same school as me but I didn't know him that well and despite the town's small size I've not seen him in months, so for all intents and purposes I came into the uni alone. I came from a fairly low achieving school (not even in the top 200 in Scotland) but despite this I don't think I've been disadvantaged by that.

Next time I'll talk a little about University Accommodation and my experiences of it. If you have any questions about it I'll try and answer as best I can.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

St Andrews Study Spaces

Image
I know if you look at my previous blog posts, you could be forgiven for thinking there's no work to do in St Andrews. Unfortunately there is that social drag in St Andrews called getting a degree and not everyone will be comfortable with studying in their rooms (personally I kinda like it but I'm used to the productivity of having my two large monitors). Now you can of course study in your room and it's where I did a lot of my work in preparations for my exams in both semesters of the last year but I understand that a lot of people don't like it. That's not to say it's a bad place to study. Your room will be familiar, comfortable and probably quite quiet (but if you want you can play music out loud without people complaining. A big selling point for me!). But if you don't like to study in your room, fortunately there's plenty of places to study in St Andrews. First up is the study spaces closest to your room. Most halls will have places to study on s
Read more

Where am I staying? What's it like? | Accommodation Introduction

Image
So you've applied for accommodation at the University of St Andrews and you might even have your offer by now but what is university accommodation like? Well given I've spent the last year as a resident of University Hall and now serve as Treasurer on the hall committee I think I should be able to tell you a little about it. In case you're a little confused about who I am and what this blog is for then please check out the "Welcome to the Blog" post where I explained just that. Anyway, university accommodation. It's not exactly easy to explain as a blanket statement for St Andrews as unlike at some universities, where every hall is basically a carbon copy of any other, every hall here is different. Different sizes, locations, types of accommodation, living arrangements, rivalries, communities and everyone experiences something different. There are a few types of accommodation at St Andrews: Standard Catered, Standard Self Catered, En-suite Catered and
Read more

John Burnet Hall | Accommodation Overview

Image
The smallest hall in St Andrews is John Burnet Hall (It's so small that I think I met only 3 or 4 people who lived there last year after Clan Warfare since they were a bit visible in their matching t-shirts). Small is no bad thing though, because you see your hall mates so often, it means everyone knows everyone and there's always a friendly face in halls. JBH (or Jeebs) is made up of two buildings - the main hall (above - which is older and looks more like Hogwarts) and the annexe (left - which is a lot more modern). The main hall is made up of the mixed Atholl Wing, and the usually all female Kilmallie and Fairways Wings. Main Hall rooms have shared bathrooms whereas the annexe rooms are en-suite. It's in a pretty good location like most of the older halls in town. JBH residents will argue they're in the best place but given McIntosh is also pretty central between the Arts and Science buildings, I'd say it's a toss up between the two (I am however bi
Read more