Euan Ramsay, MSci Physics with Photonics 2001

There was no question in my mind about where I wanted to study when I left school.  St. Andrews – sun, sea, sand, surf… well, sometimes. 

I had heard good things about St. Andrews when I was at school, both in terms of the courses that I could take, and also the social aspects of the university, especially the active societies that are connected with the union. As well as that, I already knew the town quite well from family holidays, so it seemed like a good place to go.  I seem to remember giving people directions to the union when I was on a visiting day – must be fairly unusual.

The good things that I had heard left me wondering if the place could live up to its reputation, and it certainly did.  The four years that I spent there were probably the best years of my life.

After graduating in 2001 I decided to do a PhD at Heriot-Watt University. One of the reasons that I chose to go there was the fact that my fiancée (also a physics student at St. Andrews and now my wife) had decided to become an accountant with PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Edinburgh, although I was sad to leave St. Andrews for a number of reasons.

Now I am finishing off my PhD, trying to find the time to write up and get those last elusive letters after my name.  Although I am no longer at St. Andrews as a student I try and get back every so often to visit people I know who are still there, and go over some of the old haunts again – or at least see how  many new shops have opened in the town centre.  St. Andrews holds a lot of good memories for me, and not just because I met my wife there, although an interesting statistic, and one which we seem to have contributed to, is that St. Andrews may have the highest proportion of students marrying someone they have met through university in the country,

First posted BDS 13.4.05