September 30, 2025 – Hello, hello! Another fulfilling set of days in St Andrews! Saturday September 20th marked a momentous day… the University of St Andrews vs the University of Edinburgh rival rugby match! Our quaint postgraduate residence hall (about 60 students) had a huge stake since four of our fellow residents play on the team. We shuttled from Madras College to The Hive stadium in Edinburgh. Coming from an undergraduate uni that sold t-shirts that said ‘undefeated’ with a large football across the chest as their interpretation of a cheeky joke about our lack of a football team.. I thoroughly enjoyed our Scottish ‘game-day’ experience: rowdy fans, chants (“You don’t have an airport” & “you’re just a golf course”), school merch and spirit, Americans attempting to discern the rules, halftime meetup with Bobby Jones alums (shoutout Claire and Derek!), and, naturally, some light rain. Despite a competitive match, St Andrews lost, but we had an absolute blast (and our boys are still #1 in our hearts). 

Aided by a cinnamon latte and hearty potato soup from ‘Space’ cafe on South Street, I spent Sunday completing typical graduate school duties. 

The evening unfolded with a walk around Castle Sands/the Scores and drinks with friends at “The Physician,” which is a swanky, unique bar on South Street serving custom cocktails. We took it easy that night, but one of these updates will include a review of their signature ‘cocktail tree’, which is exactly what it sounds like…

Getting into the swing of the academic semester, I found myself in the library or assorted coffee shops quite often. Best Assignment: Write a 500-word response: “what is a human?” Least favorite: Chapter 2 of my statistics textbook.

Excitingly, this week’s educational itinerary wasn’t all textbooks and lectures. My psychology cohort took a field trip to Perth – no, not Australia. Don’t worry, I was confused at first, too. Scotland’s Perth is located just over an hour northwest of St Andrews, standing along the River Tay – Scotland’s longest! Perth’s population is around 48,000¹– note St Andrews’ lies around 17,000.   My psychology cohort traveled here for the 2025 British Psychological Society Postgraduate Conference. My statistics and concepts professor. Paul Gardner, delivered an engaging keynote speech titled ‘Researchers as Storytellers,’ which drew a lot of parallels to ‘The Power of Storytelling’ class I TA-ed for Dr. Loudermilk at Emory. All with their own psychological bend to them, postgraduate dissertation topics ranged from understanding bidialectal cognitive processing to the role of religion and spirituality in counseling.  

In addition to expanding my academic horizons, I was also (thanks to my fabulous peers) getting a very serious education in UK essentials: grocery chains and pub bargains. During the lunch break, I was enthusiastically ushered into M&S foodhall (what someone likened to Whole Foods). Post-conference, my classmates introduced me to what I’ve come to understand as a quintessential British experience and destination, Wetherspoons! Where else could you get a 3-pound strawberry daiquiri or espresso martini!

Top left and center: slides by Cameron Fernie (Abertay University) – “Investigating Shared Lexical Representations Across Bidialectal Perspective”; top right: mural outside conference; bottom center: pedestrian walkway in Perth

Speaking of cultural immersion…. The ice hockey team took me on my first ever round of ⛳ Pub Golf ⛳ The rules are simple:
🎯 Objective: visit a series of pubs (the “course”), drink a set drink in each pub (the “holes”), and finish each drink according to each drink’s “par” & a stroke = continuous sip (i.e., shot = par 1, pint of beer = 2, so on and so forth). 
📜 Rules: Each pub has a par. Fewer sips = better score. Extra rules/penalties depending on the course or team traditions (i.e., spillage, bathroom breaks etc.).
🎲 How to play: Dress up (themed by team or golf attire), follow pub route, track “strokes” on a scorecard, lowest score and fastest to complete wins. 
🌙🎉 The night was an unofficial win for the team (had the game not been discontinued due to some bar shenanigans) and a personal win because I unlocked a new late-night shawarma place.

I know, it sounds like I’m splitting my time evenly between lectures and lager… but I promise I’ve made leaps and bounds in understanding prefrontal cortex functions, what methods of neuroimaging techniques give better spatial or temporal resolution, and how to perform basic statistical analyses through the IBM SPSS software. 

The last weekend in September certainly did not disappoint. On the night of our weekly semi-formals, the official welcoming of Max the Highland cow occurred. Throughout the weekend, you could find at least one person in the common room watching the Ryder Cup, either streaming it on their computer or projecting it onto our communal movie screen. 

All day Sunday, the Bobbies (emory scholars not to be confused with the slang term with british police constables… we might need to find another nickname…) took a trip to the infamous Loch Ness! Lucas seamlessly navigated a heavily foggy morning. We boarded a Jocobite Cruise out of Dochgarroch and enjoyed learning about the Loch Ness lore. ‘Twas quite a foggy morning.. A few suspicious shapes formed within the loch… who knows, it may have been Nessie. 

Metal sculpture outside the Jacobite Loch Ness Cruises Dochgarroch Lock Center – the way the metal chains were utilized reminded me of Jim Dolan’s work.

In the afternoon we perused around Inverness: quaint coffee shops, festive marketplaces, and old-timey candy shops. Like most Scottish towns I’ve encountered so far, Inverness boasts many a water feature. We spectated a local marathon whilst walking along the River Ness. Inverness also borders Beauly Firth and Moray Firth.

Left: Victorian markets in Inverness. Right: quaint coffee shop.

To complete the day trip trifecta (we’d already enjoyed a boat cruise and an urban excursion…) we drove south to a scenic/hiking destination, the Falls of Foyers. Before taking these pictures we crossed paths with a fellow southerner – all four of us commented on how comforting it was to hear a southern accent.

Falls of Foyers has two lookout points about 5 minutes off the trail head, or a 30-60 minute loop route. When we made it to the lower falls viewpoint, Lydia taught us an optical illusion trick. Step 1: try to follow a single drop of water from the top of the waterfall all the way down to the plunge pool. Step 2: Repeat five times. Step 3: if you look at the rocks on the right-hand side they’ll appear to move and morph! 

1. https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/publications/population-estimates-for-settlements-and-localities-in-scotland-mid-2020/ ↩︎