A personal take on the little things I wish I’d known before St Andrews.
When I first came to St Andrews, I thought I knew what I was getting myself into.
I had done what every slightly over-prepared incoming student does: I researched everything. I knew about the red gowns and the pier walk. I knew about Raisin Weekend. I even knew not to step on the PH in front of the quad.
So, naturally, I thought I had a pretty accurate idea of what university here would look like.
What I did not know, was that St Andrews is less about what you see in a prospectus, and more about the oddly specific things you only understand once you live here.
So, for anyone just starting out, here are the things I wish someone had told me.
Freshers’ Week is not the rest of university
Freshers’ Week can make it feel as though everyone has already found their people within 48 hours. They likely haven’t.
You will meet someone in a queue for Sinners, decide you are going to be best friends, and then possibly never see them again. You will be added to group chats that are inexplicably dead by October. You might even go to events you do not enjoy because everyone else seems to be going.
And in the middle of it, you may wonder whether everyone else is having a much better time than you. They probably are not.
The friendships that end up mattering most, often happen far more quietly: sitting next to someone in class, bumping into the same person in the library, joining a society months into term, or having a long conversation in a cramped dorm room.
I wish someone had told me that there is no deadline for finding your people.
St Andrews is tiny, until you are late
Before coming here, everyone kept telling me how small St Andrews was. “Nothing is too far away” and “You can walk everywhere,” they said, as if that was the easiest thing in the world.
Coming from a city where driving is the only option for commuting, this actually took me a while to get used to. At first, walking 15 or 20 minutes across town felt like a proper journey. Now, I barely think twice about it.
That said, St Andrews completely changes your sense of distance. A five-minute walk in September can feel far too long once it gets colder and darker. You start judging how far somewhere is based less on the actual distance, and more on the weather outside.
But walking everywhere also means you get to know the town really well. You start recognising the same faces on the street, and before you know it, the town just starts to feel familiar.
It took me a little while to adjust to how walkable St Andrews is, but now it is one of the things I love most about living here.
The wind is not a joke
Buy a proper coat.
Not a cute coat. Not a coat that you couldn’t stop looking at in the shop.
St Andrews weather has a way of humbling you.
You can leave your accommodation when it looks perfectly sunny and somehow get caught in rain and hail ten minutes later. I learnt pretty quickly that umbrellas don’t stand much of a chance against the Scottish wind, and that carrying an extra layer is always a good idea.
Everyone seems intimidating until you speak to them
One thing I noticed quite quickly at St Andrews, is how easy it is to assume that everyone else has things figured out. People are involved in so much, and it can sometimes make you feel like you should be doing more too.
But once you actually get to know people, you realise most of us are just figuring things out as we go. Someone who seems really confident in class might still be nervous about speaking, and someone who always seems busy and organised can be just as unsure about what comes next.
I think that is something worth remembering, especially in your first year. You do not have to have everything planned out to feel like you belong here.
You should join the society
Whatever society you are currently talking yourself out of joining because you “don’t know anyone,” join it.
One of the best things about St Andrews is that student life is almost entirely built by students. There are societies for everything, and if the thing you want somehow does not exist, you can quite literally create it.
You do not have to be an expert. You do not need a friend to come with you. You do not even have to stay if you hate it. Just go once.
Some of my favourite parts of university have come from saying yes to things I nearly convinced myself not to do.
Go to the beach even when you do not have a reason
This is something I wish I had done more often from the beginning.
You do not need to wait for a sunny day, because that could become a very long wait.
Walk down to West Sands when your head feels crowded. Go to East Sands with friends. Watch the sky change over the sea. Take the long way home.
There is something about living beside the water that makes St Andrews feel different from anywhere else.
It is easy to become so busy that you stop noticing how special this tiny seaside town really is. Do not.
You will see everyone, everywhere
There is no such thing as anonymity in St Andrews.
The person you met once at a party will somehow be in Tesco the next day, and there is a very real chance you will run into someone right after talking about them.
At first, it can feel slightly awkward, but it is also what makes the town feel so familiar so quickly. By a few months in, you start recognising people everywhere and waving to people you barely knew at the start of term.
The downside is that leaving the house looking completely unpresentable is always a calculated risk.
Homesickness does not always look like homesickness
I thought homesickness would be very obvious, like constantly missing home or wanting to go back. But for me, it was often much smaller than that. Sometimes it was just missing familiar food, wanting to talk to someone from home, being surrounded by people and still feeling lonely, or having a day where everything felt slightly off.
Especially when, like me, you’ve moved countries, it takes time to get used to having two places that both feel like home in different ways. You can really enjoy being at St Andrews and still miss home at the same time.
And I think that links to the biggest thing I wish someone had told me: nobody is having the perfect St Andrews experience.
There is no correct way to do St Andrews.
You do not have to love every tradition, go out all the time, join every society or have your whole future figured out in the first year. It is very easy to look around and feel like everyone else is doing more, but there really is no one way to have a good university experience.
Some weeks are genuinely magical. Others are deadlines, bad weather, missing home, and occasionally setting off the fire alarm because you burnt something in the kitchen.
And honestly, a lot of my favourite memories are the really normal ones: walking home with friends after dinner, sitting by the sea, or ending up in someone’s kitchen for much longer than planned.
And perhaps that is the one thing nobody could really have told me beforehand about the St Andrews experience: you have to live it to understand it.