After being in the town of St. Andrews for over three weeks now, it really is a nice place to live. For those of you on the east cost of the States, think Annapolis. Lots of pubs, plenty to
do and see, rolling green hills, wind that never seems to stop, and of course golf. Not to mention that most everyone here is very friendly as it is an extremely small community. Roughly 15,000 people live in the area, half of which are in some way associated with the University of St. Andrews. I can’t wait to see more of Scotland, England, and hopefully Europe.
I can has English?
Apart from the language barrier… OK, not true. Some accents are just extremely difficult to understand. I’m sure they laugh equally hard when I pronounce “crayon,” or “water.” The curriculum is roughly on par here with what I expected. In the sciences, lectures are not mandatory, but definitely recommended. Roughly every week “tutorials” are held, which are just problem sessions or handouts for students to solve. In the Physics department, the only grade you will receive is your final exam. Hopefully you know your stuff by the end of the course! Computer science courses have “practicals” which is generally when your programming assignments are due. Thus far, the classes are enjoyable, although one professor doesn’t seem interested in the course material. Apparently, he wants to study networking in Second Life. So still adjusting a bit to not having daily assigned problem sets, which is quite nice. However, I need to stay on top of teaching myself things I’m missing from St. Mary’s which they require at St. Andrews.
Don’t give me the Flickr
You probably noticed on the right panel of Beauhinks a Flickr feed. It will display the four most current images available in my Flickr profile. In addition I will supplement posts with images from Flickr. 
