Park Visit and Campus Visit

We are taking advantage of longer days (the sun sets at 8:30 pm now) and better weather (a top temperature of 12 today...you do the math!) by visiting the local Craigtoun Park, which is about ten minutes away from our house. Leah comes home from nursery around 6:00 pm each day, but that still gives us plenty of time to enjoy an hour or so on the slides, the nets and the in-ground trampolines (our favorite) before we go home for dinner. The park is quite beautiful, and there's almost never anyone there except us...and a few people walking their dogs around the lake. It's not terribly age-approriate for Leah, and most the equipment would never appear in a American playground because it's probably a bit risky. But, with John as her safety net, Leah isn't at all afraid to climb the chain link nets or the rope ladders. There are two impossibly tall and fast slides, and though on her first few trips down she emerged at the bottom with a look of sheer terror on her face, she quickly got used to them and now tackles them with surprising bravery for a two year old!

They even convinced me to give the trampoline a go!

On Tuesday, Emma and I attended an official campus visit at the University. Emma's a sophomore at home, so it's a bit early for this kind of thing. But I figured since we were here we might as well book one, to give her a sense of how these things usually go. We both know the campus buildings pretty well anyway, and we sort of know about the experience of being a student here from the things our Colgate students say, so we didn't intend to learn too much on the official tour. Also, these things are pretty much alike which ever campus you visit, and so all in all it was pretty predictable. Aside from the tagline "600 years of tradition," in the film , the campus tour could have been about any moderately-sized university in the United States, really. It seems that even the UK schools are entering into the cruise-ship-amenities rat race of college campuses, and so they included bits on the tour about their new sports centre ("amongst the best in Scotland," they said) and their redesigned and redecorated student union. Even St. Salvator's Quadrangle, one of the oldest parts of the university that features a chapel and cloisters built in 1450 (!), is freshly paved with a flagstone walkway that lists the names of major benefactors of the university. The tour guide marched our small tour group right there at the beginning of the tour and parked us over the names of those benefactors as she went through the list of opportunities that awaited prospective students.

Our tour group was made up of a family from England and two girls from New Zealand. The rest of the visitors were American. Our tour guide was Hungarian, and was in her last year at the university. As we walked with her, one of the American fathers asked her what it was about the university that made her decide to go there. She started to list the various social societies that were available to students, from the academic ones (the history society and the chemistry society) to the cultural (the drama society, the German society, the knitting society) to the wacky (the Harry Potter society or the society for those who appreciate cumulus clouds), and then she went on to describe the balls that were held by the various residence halls. She said she was majoring in international relations, and so she recognized the high quality of the IR program at St. Andrews and wanted to study under world-class researchers and teachers who could give her a good foundation for a career in international business someday. "Also," she added at the very end, "Since I'm from the EU, it's free for me to go here." That certainly left a big impression on all of us from the United States, as you can imagine!

In the end, we did have one small takeaway from the campus visit, and that was a better understanding of the differences between the curriculum in the UK university system and the American university system. At a typical American liberal arts university, a student is going to take about 4 classes each semester for eight semester, so about 32 classes in general. Of those, again in general, about one fourth of those classes are going to be related to the student's chosen major or concentration, while the rest are a part of some core requirements and possibly a minor or another major. In the UK, students actually apply to a specific program before they enroll, and then at least half and possibly more of their "modules" are taken in that program. There's no core curriculum, no distribution requirements, etc. In one's first year at St. Andrews, a student chooses three subjects to study so, using Emma and her current interests as an example, she would take a module on history, a module on French, and a module on geography. In year two, she would stick with all three of these, or she could drop either French or geography and add something like classics. In year three, she would take an honors module in history along with a module in French, but would have to drop both geography and classics at that point, and by the fourth year she would be studying only history. There are some variations possible on this, and the admissions counselor did present a scenario in which a student could change their intended subject of study after admissions, but it seems like a very difficult process. This means that students entering UK universities must have a pretty good idea of what they want to study before they apply.

I think Emma wasn't terribly enamoured of this idea, and she walked away saying she liked the American system of taking a bit of this with a bit of that along with a major. She did, however, like the UK emphasis on independent work, and their liberal use of the small-group tutorial model. She is enjoying the increased level of independence that she has at Madras College here in St. Andrews, and I think she sees the benefits of that. In fact, she actually has only one more week of school left here, because in early May all the S4, S5, and S6 students go on study leave to prepare for their National Highers exams which are given throughout May and early June. Emma is only able to take a few of the exams (a long story to be saved for another blog....), so she is enjoying the thought of lots of independent study, and lots of time in town with her friends!