After our rather adventurous and circuitous arrival to our St Andrews [punctuation accurate to local convention!] accommodations and a lovely formal dinner in Lower College Hall Wednesday evening, we emerged around 9:30 PM into a quintessentially Scottish foggy night. A crew of about 12 headed to Central Bar in hopes of sucking up some local ambience during the Scotland-Brazil World Cup match. Alas, the match did not go well for the Scots. NAFANs in a St. Andrews pub watching the Scotland World Cup match Thursday morning, we headed back to campus for a morning with St Andrews and Marshall [...]

Glasgow -> Edinburgh -> St. Andrews Fasten your seatbelts (as our bus driver Ali told us) for a wild ride as we traveled from west to east in Scotland!  We woke up in the wee hours of the morning, grabbed our nicely packed breakfast bags, and departed Glasgow for Edinburgh. Study tour group photo in front of the Edinburgh Futures Institute Upon arrival at Edinburgh, we were ushered into the new Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI), which has only been opened for a few years. Previously, it housed the Old Royal Infirmary (1879-2003), which is reflected in the motto and [...]

Welcome to Scotland! (Fun fact: Scotland has about 30% of UK land but only 8% of its people.) We woke up to another unseasonably warm and gorgeous day in the UK and made our way to the University of Glasgow. Our student accommodations—simple bedrooms with small en suite wet-room-style bathrooms and a shared kitchen on each floor—were a short ride through the city’s West End past lush botanical gardens and streets lined with historic 19th-century sandstone buildings. Upon arrival, university staff member Charlie led us into the Gilbert Scott Building, the university’s most iconic structure, where ceremonies bookend the student experience [...]

We started the morning off at Queen's University Belfast (QUB) with a welcome and campus tour. I have included a couple of slides from our opening presentation because first of all, I'm 100% confident that the professional campus photographer can do a better job than my old-timey android phone, and second, I want everyone who's reading this at home to get a sense of the general information QUB staff shared with us. Queen's University Belfast is a friendly, beautiful campus and certainly seems deserving of its 2026 recognition as the "University of the Year" as voted on by What Uni? Student [...]