Story Location: Scotland
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Dancing Through Scotland
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How Dance Taught Me Lessons I Used During and After My Semester Abroad My parents enrolled me in dance classes at the age of four and I’ve been dancing my way through life ever since. Dance has been an integral part of my life from a young age and has given me many opportunities to…
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Feeling at Home Abroad
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Most weekends this semester, you’d find me in or around St Andrews, Scotland. Unlike many study abroad students, I have not been doing as much traveling this semester. Don’t get me wrong: I love traveling and I think it’s a great part of your study abroad experience. Due in part to my limited finances, however,…
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Edinburgh vs. Boston: 3 Differences
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Even before deciding to study abroad, I knew that the American university system is based off of the Scottish education structure. Some of the courses I signed up for, based on the syllabi, were even very similar to ones I had taken at Brandeis, my home university. And, of course, they speak English here. Knowing this,…
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How Not to Get a Prescription in Edinburgh
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I have epilepsy. Luckily for me, it’s no big deal. I’ve had it all my life, but was only diagnosed when I was 16. After that, they quickly put me on an antiepileptic medication that controls it well – I’ve been seizure free since 2012. In fact, if all goes well, I’ll even be off…
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U.S. Election: A Perspective from Abroad
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This year was my first time voting in a presidential election; it’s the same for many of my U.S. friends studying abroad with me. We couldn’t help but notice how odd it was watching it from across the ocean. Sitting in Scotland, reading BBC and the New York Times, scrolling through Twitter and Facebook, it…
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Edinburgh: 4 Friends and Their Families
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Parents worry. That’s sort of their job. Even if their son or daughter is 20 years old and hasn’t lived at home in years. Even if their child normally goes to school hundreds of miles away and there’s this thing called a cell phone that reduces that distance to almost nothing. Of course, that’s not…
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Sights and Society: Remembering the History as a Tourist
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A perk of studying abroad with IFSA-Butler: the excursions that are included in the cost. Last week, IFSA organized a trip to the Highlands for all the students on the Scotland program—that’s around 100 of us from four cities, on four buses on a four-hour drive. (I don’t know why but four seems to be the magic…
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Why I Chose to Make Friends Outside Edinburgh’s Queer Community
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As an asexual person, I live a very quiet life in the LGBTQ community. I identify as queer, so it’s hardly surprising that I have a lot of friends who also identify as queer. Well, I do back home that is. I didn’t regularly attend any LGBTQ clubs or groups or anything like that on…
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A Homesick Student’s Guide to Spending the Holiday Season Abroad
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For me, November is always a hard month. By November, I’ve passed out of midterm hell and I wade through the month as a sort of holiday purgatory; it’s when I feel the most homesick. Normally, I don’t go home for Thanksgiving—the break is too short, the plane tickets too expensive—but as the air gets chillier and I…
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How to Get Involved in Theatre at the University of Edinburgh
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Edinburgh is well known for the performing arts. Every summer, it hosts the Fringe Festival, one of the world’s largest gatherings for music, theatre, dance and comedy. Although Fringe 2016 has already passed, my tutorial instructor for my History of Edinburgh course told us during our tour of the Royal Mile that his favorite game…
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