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Hi everybody.

Thank you for joining us.

This is going to be a short and sweet session on the academic induction program and orientation before you start your courses at St Andrews in the fall.

This is very much an optional program.

It's really just to help those students that feel like they need a little extra time to make that start a little bit more of an easier transition.

So essentially what this is is a program to introduce you to what expectations are for academics at St Andrews, give you kind of an overview, a chance to try out some writing and presentations, and also just to give you a chance to learn a little bit more about the lay of the land at St Andrews.

For 2026, the arrival is on the 22nd of August.

There are approximately 40 to 50 students that attend this every year.

And tuition and room and board is, you know, it changes year on year, but for 2026 it's £1,180 and then the accommodation and meals on top of that is an additional £600.

So the key here is if you decide this is something that you want to do, you will need to decide that before you start your visa application because you will need to put the date that you plan on arriving in St Andrews on that visa application.

And of course, if you choose to do this, it would be two extra weeks early.

The courses are generally like informational sessions.

So you'll learn a little bit more about academic advising.

You'll learn a little more about degree structure, what support services we have, how to use the library, all those types of things.

And we'll also have sessions that are focused more on academic skills.

So, writing might be a bit different than you're used to from high school.

So, you'll work on some writing, some essays.

You'll learn about what we expect in terms of narrating a slide presentation or presenting a poster of your work.

And then of course we'll have some academic talks.

So this is just to introduce you to some of our interdisciplinary approaches to our different courses, and it's really meant just to give you a taste of what you can expect going forward.

It might give you a time to, you know, trigger some inspiration on subjects that you didn't know that you might be interested in.

And then we'll also have forums which are times for students to, you know, engage with each other and discuss what they've learned, which is really an important part of how things work at St Andrews in your tutorials that you'll have associated with all of your lectures and classwork.

So, a typical day in this two-week period is going to be pretty much all day.

You'll have three hours in the morning, a nice break for lunch, and then a couple hours in the afternoon.

Which leaves, you know, some time for exploring as well.

You will have two assessments, and these are not for credit.

Nothing to worry about.

It's really just a time for us to give you some feedback on what you might expect when you start your actual courses at St Andrews.

So, the grading system is quite a bit different.

You'll learn, you know, you'll find out what's expected of you, how we grade, and just kind of get you ready for that first semester.

And of course, there's quite a bit of fun as well.

There'll be some, you know, field trips, there'll be walks in St Andrews, you'll visit some historical sites, and then of course some Scottish dancing is always one of the highlights as well.

So, before I pass it on to John to talk a little bit more about orientation, I just want to say that the academic induction is a wonderful tool if you are feeling like you need that extra time.

It is a small cohort, so you'll notice that most people do not take part in it and they do absolutely fine without it.

But it is a nice option if you feel like it would be helpful for you.

Okay, John, I'm going to switch over to orientation and let you take it from there.

Yeah, thank you very much, Sarah.

So, the orientation program, or as you will often hear it referred to, freshers week, really covers and starts before actually even freshers week does.

So, before you arrive, you're going to be given links to some online modules that you need to complete.

And these are listed on here.

Our colleagues in the registry office will send those emails out over the summer, so June, July, possibly even into early August.

You are going to receive links to those and you're expected to complete those online.

Best to do it that way rather than waiting and scrambling to do it once you arrive.

Have that out of the way.

Once you arrive in St Andrews, one of the first terms that we're going to use that may be a little bit confusing to you is matriculation.

Matriculation is when you will go and receive your ID, make sure all your paperwork is in order, do a lot of the more logistical things, and you will be told exactly where to go, when to go to fill out all of those kind of things.

During the fresher week also, you're going to meet with your academic advisor for the first time.

In most cases, this is your chance to add that second or third module, the second or third subject area and get that all confirmed.

You're going to do exciting things like register with health services to make sure you're registered with a general practitioner so that if you need to access the National Health Service, that's going to be done seamlessly.

We've got staff there to help walk you through all of these kind of activities and events.

And the other thing actually probably even more important is the fun events and the chance to meet other students that will run throughout the freshers week.

So orientation week really this year you are going to be moving in on Saturday 6th September if you are living in a university residence hall.

If you are living independently, you of course can work that out with your landlord about when exactly you want to move in.

Orientation week at freshers week starts on Monday the 8th of September.

There's a few events on Sunday as well, often related to your residence hall, and there is an event for parents, a reception and a pier walk on that Sunday that's part of it.

Then classes will begin on Monday the 15th of September.

So you have a full week of orientation activities, opportunities to get to know your fellow students.

The orientation guide is really a key element to your week and this is an online app.

So whether iPhone or Android, you can download the app and it's available now.

So this gives you an idea of some of the kind of events that we had last freshers week last year and it will be a similar series of events this year.

So you're going to find opportunities to learn more about all of these different topics about support; there will be a clubs fair where you can go sign up for any clubs or societies you want to.

St Sport will arrive and have a give it a go day where you can try out any sport you would like and see if that is something you want to pursue more.

There will be a lot on some of the essentials of health and well-being and navigating the university.

So a lot of seminars on those types of activities, family members coming along.

There are two things to note there.

There's really only one international family welcome on the Sunday after the move-in.

That's the only event and then we really kind of encourage parents to move along, see the rest of Scotland if you'd like to a bit more, and let your students start to immerse themselves in the culture and the academic life of St Andrews.

I will also note that if family members are coming along, and often family will arrive a few days early to help buy things you may want for your residence hall, overcome jet lag, get acclimated to life in Scotland.

If you want to stay in St Andrews for that period, you need to book very very early because there's a limited amount of guest accommodation in St Andrews.

You can also consider staying in Dundee about 30 minutes to the north or Edinburgh about an hour to the south.

Both have more accommodation available.

Both are easy to get to St Andrews from both of those locations.

So, it can work out well and both actually probably have a little bit more retail shopping than St Andrews itself does.

So, it can be helpful to be in those locations when you're looking for sheets or blankets or towels or some of the things that you may want for your residence hall.

Thank you so much for joining me, John.

I hope this was helpful to all of you listening and please join us for some of our other recorded sessions and reach out if you have any other questions.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Hello everyone.

Thank you for joining us today to learn more about music at the University of St Andrews.

My name is Sarah Smith, and I'm a regional manager in the US, and I am joined by Alistair Wilde, who I will let introduce himself, and then we'll have a little chat about music.

Thanks.

Yeah, my name is Alistair.

I'm the Regional Manager for the UK here at the university and, outside of my role working in admissions, performing, undertaking, listening, and being involved in music is probably the thing I did the most during my time as a student at St Andrews, and truth be told, it's possibly the thing I still do the most to this day.

So music in St Andrews is based out of the Laidlaw Music Centre, and from this building emanates all of the musical opportunities that you can expect to really undertake in St Andrews.

From a lovely performance space that has beautiful acoustics with a completely pneumatic floor that can be remapped depending on who is performing in there and the kind of acoustics that are needed to get the most out of the performance, all the way through to smaller spaces.

There's a recording studio, offering the opportunity to engage in electronic music production.

There are instruments that you can borrow.

If you've always wanted to pick up an instrument for the first time, you can do so with music lessons and even borrow the instrument, all the way through to there being a huge number of different groups, both large groups, small groups, audition groups, non-audition groups, choral groups, and instrumental groups.

No matter how you like to engage in music, it usually for the most part takes place in the Laidlaw Music Centre one way or the other.

And there are a huge number of ways that you can be engaged, right.

So if someone wanted to maybe take part in a band or an orchestra or any of those things, how does that work?

How do they find their people and start that process when they start as a fresher at St Andrews?

Yeah, absolutely.

So the groups come in a number of different sort of guises and have different requirements to them.

So the best way is in the very first week, in that freshers week, there is a music fair that is held, and from that there will be representatives from the Laidlaw Music Centre run by the university, but actually from a huge number of other musical groups that are based in St Andrews as well, whether they're affiliated with the music society or actually some of the other music societies that are based in St Andrews too.

So you can go in there, you can sign up whether they are auditioned, you can select your audition slot, or if they're unauditioned, you can learn a little bit more about the groups, what that entails in terms of their rehearsal schedule, what it looks like, and even perhaps some of the repertoire or what you might end up performing or getting involved in as well.

Is there anything that a student would want to do prior to coming over to St Andrews if they want to be involved?

Yeah.

So the Music Centre is really friendly and open to you reaching out to them if there are any questions you have about any specific groups or opportunities that you want to get involved in.

And even if you don't want to engage in music in a formal way, there are opportunities for you to be matched with like-minded individuals.

Whether it's that you want to form your own rock band, you can reach out to that music centre ahead of time and they can see if there is anybody else who's looking for a bassist or a guitarist or a singer, whatever it might be, all the way through to helping you with how best to navigate shipping a cello halfway across the world and all these sorts of things in terms of what you might need and how to go about it.

So reaching out to the music centre is always the best thing to do ahead of time if you do have any specific questions or you're worried about anything in particular.

Amazing.

So for someone like me that does not have musical talent but appreciates musical talent, what sort of options are there to listen and to find concerts and maybe just some music around town?

Yeah.

So broadly speaking, music is split into a variety of different categories in St Andrews and a large chunk of it is run by the university through the Music Centre.

And to that end, they have a huge number of different musical performances that happen day in, day out, week in, week out.

So there is a lunchtime concert series that brings in not only talented students or staff members who are associated with the university to be able to perform.

And again, eventually you might be able to undertake one of those lunchtime concerts, should you wish, either singing or performing.

And they cover pretty much any genre of music you can think of.

There have been some pretty weird, wonderful, wacky, but also quite beautiful performances that have been done as part of that lunchtime concert series.

But also there will be professionals who come and join us as well.

St Andrews has an affiliation with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which means that at least once a semester there'll be a Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert that you can attend.

And beyond that, there is a really lively music scene in St Andrews associated with and actually associated not with the university.

So there are a number of different clubs and music societies that aren't officially affiliated with the university's music centre, and that includes things like our folk and trad society that have folk sessions every Tuesday that you can attend and just go and listen to some traditional folk music.

There are jazz nights, for example, basically open mic nights for jazz that happen every Thursday, for example, as well as there being any number of different venues around St Andrews that host local talent and people coming to perform in particular.

Especially if you're coming as a fresher, I would keep an eye out for what's happening in that freshers week because ordinarily there's also at least a large band of some description that will be invited to come and perform as part of that freshers week as well.

So from the very first week and pretty much all the way through, there are ample different ways that you can engage with music and listen and really get involved with it one way or the other.

And I'm told they do bring in DJs and sometimes bands or vocalists to the six 0 1 club at the student union.

Absolutely the so-called bops.

There's a whole range of different things that you can get involved in and listening to guest DJs.

I remember, again, this is going back a little while now, it might be my third year, that we even had the person who plays Hodor from Game of Thrones who moonlights as a DJ come and do a set in one of those bops, which was pretty bizarre.

Hodor Yeah, absolutely.

He had a go through some of his DJ sets.

But yeah, that's awesome.

So how about musical theatre?

Because I know that's a very lively part of St Andrews.

A lot of students get engaged with that.

Can you tell us a bit about that?

Yeah.

So in terms of drama and what that looks like, even beyond musical theatre, there's a good amount of overlap.

You're automatically enrolled in that drama society as soon as you become a student.

So it's not even one that you have to actively try and join if you want.

You're sort of automatically part of that, but linked to that and alongside them, there are a number of different productions that you can get involved in, and you can get involved with them in a number of different ways.

So I've had friends who are particularly adept and like doing, for example, the lighting in shows or like doing the sound design or costume design, for example.

They wouldn't be seen dead actually acting on the stage or getting involved, but all the behind the scenes stuff they really enjoyed.

So suffice to say, no matter how you like to engage with something like musical theatre, there will be opportunities for you to do that, whether it's again through officially the music centre or whether it's any of the other clubs and societies.

There's a Gilbert and Sullivan society, for example, that will always put on different performances every year.

There's an opera society that will put on different things, usually held in the Byre Theatre.

It's certainly, despite being a relatively small place and a small university, there's always stuff going on that you can get involved in too.

And crucially, I think one of the things that I particularly enjoyed, and it's something that I found myself being involved in music, is that St Andrews is small enough that you can really make your mark on any of these clubs or societies or centres.

I started playing in the university big band in my very first year of my degree.

And by the second year I was running it, I was conducting it, I was organising the concerts, choosing all the music, and sort of trying to run the good ship big band as it were, for a number of years after that point.

And you have that freedom and you have that ability with anything to do with music, drama, musical theatre, that it's sort of the best of both worlds.

It's lively enough.

There are enough students, there's enough energy that goes into these sorts of things that there are ample opportunities for you to get involved as much or as little as you like.

But if you really do want to take it further, throw yourself in, get involved in absolutely everything.

Get involved in even the directing and the production, in the acting, however you like to get involved.

So there's opportunities for you to do so; are there some groups that go outside of St Andrews to perform or maybe up to Edinburgh Fringe Festival?

But I'm sure there's other opportunities too.

Yeah, absolutely.

So depending on the kind of group that you are and how adventurous you're feeling essentially.

So those that are student run often do find a home at the Fringe every year, whether that is a cappella groups, for example, frequently there are a cappella groups that will go and perform, but also musical theatre, comedy troupes.

Musical comedy is fairly frequently held at the Fringe and people will go there.

But actually, it's not unknown to do more local tours around Scotland or the UK, but actually there are some groups, for example, the university's Chamber Orchestra will fairly frequently tour not just around the UK but even further afield.

And likewise the Chapel choir, for example, will often have performances around the world too, whether that's in North America or whether it's in Europe and even further afield from that in some cases too.

So there are again opportunities to see more of the world while being engaged in music or actually just be slightly closer to home and gig in Dundee and gig in Edinburgh, gig in Glasgow, for example.

There's lots of opportunities to really take advantage of all of the music that St Andrews has to offer for such a relatively small town.

There's so much going on, whether it's just going down and listening to a folk session on a Tuesday evening, whether it's even, for example, on St Andrews Day.

That happens every year.

There's usually a Ceilidh that happens in the streets that you can go and attend and listen to some good music, for example, and traditional Scottish dance and Scottish music through to, you know, more kind of DJ orientated sets through a good number of rock bands.

There's so much going on and absolutely take advantage of it while you can.

It's a beautiful place to do it.

It's a beautiful place to be involved with all of the music that we have here and there's so many good groups that you can join that you can get involved in.

And if you're on the fence, you're wondering, should I give it a go?

Should I pick up that instrument?

Should I try singing?

Should I even try and record something?

You absolutely should.

While all of the facilities are here, give it a go.

Why not?

That is a perfect way to end our discussion on music at St Andrews.

Alistair, this was really helpful.

I learned a lot talking to you, so I'm sure everyone that's listening or watching will be able to pick up something that they didn't know yet.

Alistair, thank you so much for all the information you provided today.

It was incredibly helpful and thank you all for joining us and reach out if we can be of any further help.

Have a great day.

My name is Thomas Marr, I'm one of the assistant directors of admissions at the University of St Andrews, and I'm joined today by my colleague, Karen Doshi, who is based in the United States.

Would you like to say hi, Karen?

Hi, my name is Karen Doshi.

As Thomas said, it's my fourth year with St Andrews.

I'm based just north of New York City.

Hopefully this will help answer some of your questions today.

OK, so what we're going to focus on today is just two aspects of the university and the town.

We're going to talk in general terms about why you might choose St Andrews and decide to attend now that you've been made an offer.

And then we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about the degree structure and some of the flexibility that's available here if you're studying for a four-year degree.

So just to give you a bit of an overview on some of the numbers that we feel are important in terms of St Andrews, whether you've visited or not, there's probably something new for you to learn here.

But basically we want you to remember that the university was founded in 1413.

So we're a 15th-century institution, just over 600 years old.

And right now we've not grown an awful lot from that starting point.

We're still what you might call a mid-size university.

So we're about 8400 undergraduates and with approximately 2000 graduates on top, it's just over a 10,000 person community.

The really interesting part is the fact that the town of St Andrews is only about 20,000 people.

Approximately half the population are students, so it's a lovely place to spend time.

I think the big take away for me is always that you can't really be anonymous in St Andrews.

So although that 10,000 students sounds like quite a lot, the fact that the town is so small and everybody is so close together means that students see the same faces over and over again and start to get recognised.

And it's a place that you're really not going to be anonymous for long.

So we hope that you would enjoy that aspect.

It really feels like it's got a warm and welcoming community and people look out for each other.

It feels very safe.

And while you won't know everybody, you'll certainly know a lot more people, given the size and the compactness of the town, than you might do in a larger, more spread out institution of the same size.

Right now the rankings like us; we are consistently in the top echelon of the University Rankings in the UK.

So we're currently #2 in the Guardian rankings from 2026 and #2 in the Times and Sunday Times rankings.

We're very proud of the fact that we're an International University, so over 40% of our students are currently from outside the UK.

What we're really proud of is our high retention rate.

Just over 98% of our students remain in St Andrews, coming back for year 2 after they've completed year one.

At any university, the first year is likely to be the riskiest year in terms of things going wrong or you deciding that you don't enjoy it and you want to leave.

So we're always delighted that the retention rate is so high and we don't take that for granted.

We do a lot of work to make sure that students are prepared before they come to Scotland so that there are no surprises.

And then the support systems and some of the traditions at St Andrews also really help with the retention and students feeling that they've made a good decision and that they want to stay with us in Scotland.

Just a little bit about the fun side of the university: we have about 180 student societies, we have over 55 sports available, and we have over 100 competitive teams amongst these sports.

So there's loads to do, loads to get involved with and it's a really good balance between your academics and the fun to be had outside the classroom and all of the social life and things.

So a pretty good package.

The final couple of stats I'll mention are that just over 2000 of our students currently receive some kind of scholarship funding, whether that's a full ride, of which we have a small number, and down to smaller amounts in terms of accommodation support.

OK, just to give you a little bit of a heads up about the numbers, about 59% of our students come from the UK.

So we're very much a Scottish university first and we are a British university.

Overall, we have about 7% of our students coming from the European Union, about 13% coming from Africa and Asia and Southeast Asia, and 21% coming from the Americas.

It's about 7 hours to travel from the East Coast of the United States to the UK.

There are direct flights from Edinburgh available and if you're travelling from the West Coast, it's a good bit further and you're not going to be able to travel directly, but you're looking at between nine and 14 hours depending on where you stop.

If you're travelling from other parts of the world, as far away as Australia, you're looking at about a 22 hour journey.

So it is a good point to remind you that you should go and look at the study abroad information on our website if you're at all interested in going overseas right now.

About 15% of our students engage in study abroad at some point, normally in 3rd year for a semester or a year.

But I have to say that through my experience, a lot of people who talk about study abroad end up not doing it because they feel that being abroad in St Andrews is enough.

And there are quite a lot of people that come to St Andrews with study abroad aspirations who end up deciding to spend the whole of their degree in Scotland.

So you have options there.

But I would just want to underline that study abroad is competitive and not everybody who wants to go abroad will actually be able to go because of the restriction on places that we have.

OK, we're zooming in now a little bit.

If you're watching our slides or if you want to look at a map of Europe, we are now showing you some different flight times between main airports around the UK.

So if you do want to go and travel around at all, if you have a long weekend or you've got a break and you want to go away with friends, for example, whether it's skiing or a trip to the continent for some nightlife, or you want to go and do some exploring in the Mediterranean, you can be in about 20 different countries in under 4 hours.

So it's incredibly diverse.

It's an amazing opportunity.

And I think the other thing I would mention is that as much as students think about this travel, you've got a lot of fun stuff to explore on your doorstep as well.

So don't forget about the Highlands of Scotland.

Don't forget about the hills and the lakes in the north of England that are really beautiful things to go and see in the UK as well, within easily a three to five hour drive in many directions.

So hopefully this will be something that you get to explore while you're with us.

If you've got time and budget, your favourite airlines will become Ryanair and EasyJet and you should definitely look into those websites to see some of the opportunities and the connectivity available from Edinburgh Airport.

The other thing I would mention is the very good transport links that we have between Edinburgh, St Andrews and parts of the rest of the UK.

If you're a British person, you tend to moan quite a lot about bus and rail connections and how everything's slow and eventually runs a little bit late.

But actually the reality is that we're very, very fortunate to have really good and well linked up public transport services.

That's a good time to remind you all, if you didn't know already, that we have free bus travel in Scotland as a government policy for everybody under 22 years of age.

So that is a card and a ticket that you can sort out when you arrive in Scotland.

But it's a given that you'll be able to get that and it really will save you a lot of money depending on how much travel you're deciding to do.

OK, last little bit of information for me then before I pass you over to Karen.

Just a maybe a couple minutes left.

And we just want to remind you, when we're talking about the town that St Andrews University occupies, we have an incredibly strong sense of community, as I've mentioned already, because of how large the student community is as a proportion of the town and how small the town is, meaning that everybody crisscrosses the same areas over and over again and starts to recognise people very soon after joining.

It's incredibly safe, it's very supportive, and it's extremely diverse.

One random thing I want to mention is the beautiful beaches that we have.

It might seem a bit of a strange thing to highlight to you, but the beaches in St Andrews, of which there are three, are amongst the best in the UK in terms of their cleanliness.

They're lovely golden sand and the fact that they're only about 5 to 10 minutes walk from the middle of town and they're highly accessible means that they are used very, very frequently by students.

Whether you're into water sports or bird watching or none of the above, the beaches are a very, very nice facility to have; a beautiful, natural resource which we have just on the very edge of the town.

Finally, I think if you haven't visited St Andrews, we've mentioned a lot today already about how it's a small town, but I think it's always good to remember that St Andrews, although small, is not a small town in terms of the facilities and the opportunities for doing things and meeting people; it's probably best to describe it as a small town but with big town amenities.

So the cinema is good and there's a driving range.

There are seven golf courses in the town that you can access as a student.

The gym is good.

The natural habitat and environment is beautiful and very clean.

And there's loads and loads of things going on here that you can get involved with within the town itself without even being involved in some of the university activities.

So yeah, I would urge you to look into that side as well because I think it's easy to paint St Andrews as being small and not truly appreciate how much is going on and the variety of things available to you if you decide to come and study here.

For those of you watching the slideshow, there's a picture on screen now which gives you an overview of what the town looks like; this is just a good time to remind you that there isn't a campus for the university within the town.

The town and the university share the same space and are just interlinked, and they mingle together as you move from town to university buildings.

They are right next to each other as you walk down the streets.

In the top left of this photo is the area where many of our newer accommodation buildings and our housing are located and also where our sports facilities are based.

And as you move down into the middle of this photograph, you have Market Street right in the middle.

You have North Street on the right and South St on the left.

That's really the main business area of the town in terms of bars, restaurants, and shopping facilities.

It's also where most of the student flats that students rent privately are located.

And within this whole photograph, there are also about 8 or 9 different housing options that are heading away in the photo if you know where to look.

And there are in total about 12 different housing options for students, which offer over 4000 rooms across the university for students in years 1, 2, 3 and 4.

So you're not just given housing in year 1, you have housing options in the later years as well.

Again, we've got over 600 years of tradition.

So there's lots of fun and unusual things that go on in our community that maybe are not available at other institutions.

But if you want to come back and find out about traditions, we'll have sessions about those on another day.

We currently have 10,000 students, as I mentioned, with over 130 countries and territories represented.

It's an award-winning student experience in terms of the reputation, the rankings, and the accolades that we collect each year.

And finally, the institution.

Having so many international students means that we've got a growing and incredibly international group of alumni.

So wherever you are in the world and whatever you might relocate to in future for work or study, there will almost certainly be St Andrews students around you that you can connect with.

And that's lovely in terms of advice; if you're moving somewhere new or if you're looking to build a social life when you move to a different place, it's a ready-made network of people that you can plug into having been at our institution.

OK, so I'm going to have a little break at that point, and I'll pass on to Karen, who's going to talk you through some aspects of undergraduate study and our flexible degree structure.

Thanks.

Thank you, Thomas.

So I'm glad to talk with you about the structure.

In terms of your offer, you've been given an offer within one of our faculties.

So our faculties are the arts, divinity, science, and medicine.

Most of you will fall into the arts or science faculty.

There's a few divinity students and even fewer medicine students coming from North America.

And what that really means is you'll be either completing a MA, which is a Master of Arts degree, or a BSc, a Bachelor of Science.

Now, sometimes there's confusion in the American market about the Master of Arts degree.

It really is the equivalent of a bachelor's degree.

It's just that we're 600 years old and that's what we've always called it.

So we won't be changing that anytime soon.

But rest assured, the Master of Arts is a bachelor's degree.

So some of our subjects are in the faculty of arts, cross faculty, and the faculty of science.

And so if you've been given a Master of Arts offer in one of the cross faculty subjects, and some of those include economics, geography, management, psychology, some of our more popular subjects, you're able to take courses in the faculty of arts.

If you've gotten a Bachelor of Science in economics, for example, you can take classes in the faculty of science.

And so really what that means is when you're in a faculty in your first two years, you're able to take courses outside of your subject area within your faculty.

The cross faculty subjects allow you to go in both directions depending on which degree you're doing, MA versus BSc.

So for your degree structure, the way it works is you have two sub-honours years where you're able to explore subjects outside of your subject area.

And then your final two years are called your honours years, where you'll be taking subjects just within your subject area of your single honours or of your joint honours.

So we start with a lot of breadth and flexibility in the first two years and we finish with depth and specialism in your final two years.

So what that might look like may be a little different depending on whether you're doing a Master of Arts or a Bachelor of Science.

In your Master of Arts degree, you would be taking 3 modules in your first year in each semester.

And what that might look like if you're an English single honours, you might take one English class, one philosophy class and one art history class.

And you can repeat that cycle in your second year.

In your final two years, your third and fourth year, you'll have to decide if you're doing a single honours English, then you'll just focus on English for those final two years.

Or if you're doing a joint honours, then maybe you're doing English and art history, for example.

For your Bachelor of Science, you're able to have some flexibility in your first two years, slightly less than the Master of Arts folks, because you do have to get specialised a bit sooner.

So as you see, if you're looking at our slides, your second year you do sort of hone in on 2 subjects for your Bachelor of Science.

And then the final two years look a lot like the Master of Arts in terms of you going to be focusing on your single honours or your joint honours classes for your final two years.

So here's a visual for those of us looking at the slide to visualise what it might look like for the pathway.

For a student studying biology graduating in a single honours with marine biology, they may start out taking 3 modules: biology, chemistry and statistics.

They decide they really just like biology and statistics.

So their second year they're going to focus on those two courses and finally they want to get their degree in a single honours in marine biology.

So the last two years they would just be studying courses in marine biology.

And so that's one way that it might look for a single honours Bachelor of Science student; for a Master of Arts if you're doing a joint honours, here's what that might look like.

Perhaps you're starting out with ancient history, and this is a good example because a lot of students in the States often ask me, am I locked into the subject that I've been offered?

So for example, maybe you're offered single honours in ancient history.

Many of our students do end up switching their subjects as they go through their coursework, and so here's an example of how a student might have done that.

So they took one course in ancient history, one in Spanish and one in philosophy.

They repeated that in their second year and then in our final two years, the student decided actually, I really would like to focus on just Spanish and philosophy.

They dropped the ancient history and that is what they got their joint honours degree in.

And so sometimes that is a conversation with your advisor in terms of how you can switch your focus.

But generally you do need to make sure you've taken those courses in your first two years.

So for example, this student took Spanish and philosophy both years, so they were able to focus on it and graduate in it for a joint honours degree.

Our teaching models: we do have a really small ratio of a 1 to 12 academic staff to student ratio.

There are varied class times per week.

So you might have, for example, in a class, or we call them modules, you have one lecture a week and maybe 2 tutorials which are really small group study sessions.

And there's a lot of focus on independent study and group work outside.

So just another difference in terms of the way we structure things.

There are continuous assessments and exams at St Andrews, but there isn't regular homework or weekly homework.

You'll have chunkier, larger assessments and it won't be checking in on your reading.

They just expect that you do the reading or that you're doing the work outside of class so that you're prepared for those exams.

We are also known for our research opportunities; our vertically integrated projects are one of our newer opportunities.

But there are research opportunities throughout St Andrews in terms of sciences and social sciences.

So sometimes it might be you pairing with a professor that you really admire, wanting to work with them, or a more formal vertically integrated project.

Thomas, if you want to speak more about research opportunities or anything like that?

Sure, yeah, I can do.

I think the part I'd like to highlight is that every student at undergraduate level has to complete a dissertation or project in their third or fourth year.

So that's normally a significant piece of original research with a write up usually running out at between 7,500 to 15,000 words depending on the subject and the way that the project has been designed.

A lot of students are satisfied with that much research.

But for those who want to do a little bit more, the best way of accessing that opportunity is to think about the vertically integrated projects, which have only been really running for the last few years.

But there are hundreds of students per year that get involved in those.

And those tend to be the kind of students that want more than the minimum research available.

And they're an opportunity for students from semester 2 of year one right the way through to 4th year and graduate students and PhD students to work together on a singular project that everybody involved is contributing to.

They also have a symposium and a conference because there are other universities that run VIPs as well.

And there are actually awards and recognition opportunities for the best projects around the world each year.

So it's a really exciting thing to be involved with if that's what you're wanting to do.

But it's not going to be the kind of opportunity that is going to appeal to absolutely everybody.

So I would advise as a final shot to go and look at the vertically integrated projects section of the website.

There's lots of information there about new up and coming projects and updates on some of the existing ones, and also feedback on ones that have been completed in years gone by.

So have a look at that if you're interested.

And if you've got any questions on that, there's an email address about VIPs that you can contact for further information.

I think that's the end of our presentation.

So thank you all for listening or for being here on the slides if you're with us visually as well.

Thank you so much for tuning in today and listening to what we've got to say.

And there'll be more of these sessions coming along shortly, so please look out for those.

And in the meantime, if you want to check back and have a look at the website, there's lots of information sessions advertised there that you can register for, both virtual and in person.

And please also look out for some of the academic specific sessions that are coming up.

Hi, everyone.

Thank you for joining us to learn more about accommodation at the University of St Andrews.

My name is Sarah Smith, I am one of the regional managers, and I have two guests with me today to talk through some of the key points about housing at St Andrews.

John, would you like to introduce yourself next?

And then our special guest is Lawrence Skinner.

Absolutely.

So as Sarah mentioned, my name is John Wells and I am on the East Coast, one of the other regional managers based in the US.

And we're really happy today to have Lawrence Skinner joining us.

And Lawrence, if you want to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about accommodation at St Andrews.

Thank you so much for having me, guys.

So it's lovely to meet you; I'm Lawrence Skinner, I work in the admissions team based in Scotland in St Andrews, and I've been working at the university for about 2 1/2 to three years now.

And yeah, I'm really looking forward to giving you guys some information on accommodation.

So here we have a couple of slides on accommodation at St Andrews and you can see some examples here.

In the top left hand corner is a single bedroom at John Burnett Hall, one of the halls of residence here.

And the one in the bottom left is one of the common rooms, that kind of social space in St Salvator's or Sally's Hall at the university.

So accommodation at St Andrews is guaranteed for anyone in their first year.

So anyone coming in to study at St Andrews is guaranteed a space in one of our halls of residence, as we call them.

And there are a few different halls of residence dotted around the town of St Andrews, all within walking distance of the various university buildings and facilities.

When you apply for accommodation, which you would do once you've accepted an offer to the university, you apply not to a specific hall of residence, but to accommodation in general.

But on that accommodation application, you include information about what kind of style of accommodation you'd be most interested in.

And the three main choices you have there are a single room or are you happy to share a bedroom?

For bathrooms, would you prefer an en suite bathroom or would you be comfortable sharing the bathroom with other students?

Regarding catering, would you like your meals provided for you by the university catering team, or would you prefer a self-catered accommodation where you have a shared kitchen and you can provide your own meals and get experimental in the kitchen?

So these three choices are ranked on your accommodation application and our accommodation team will do their best to match you up with what your preference is.

And about 92% of students get their either first or second choice of accommodation style at the university.

The accommodation form also includes some additional questions, including about any disability or additional requirements that a student might need.

But there's also information where students can reflect upon their interests a little bit and about their university course that they're coming in to study.

And very importantly, especially where a student might be opting in for shared bedrooms, what time do they wake up and what time do they go to bed?

And that's a really good way of making sure students have roughly similar lifestyle patterns, but also might have a working relationship and a comfortable relationship with the person who they're sharing with as well.

Excellent.

So I think one of the other things that is worth considering is that even though St Andrews is quite small, there are a wide range of accommodations that may be somewhere a little further out.

For instance, David Russell Apartments is about a 20-25 minute walk into town, whereas Sally's is right there in the middle of town, but some of those are mostly shared rooms. Is that right?

Yeah.

So it's important to have maybe an idea of what kind of style of accommodation you'd be applying for and where that might be and what facilities might be included there as well.

Some of the accommodation buildings more in the centre of town, like Sally's or Mackintosh, are often in the older style of buildings, which are very pretty from the outside, but very often they're also shared bedrooms and they're usually catered as well in most instances.

So it's where most of the older university buildings are and where many of the arts-based subjects are taught.

And that would be probably only a 5-minute walk to some of the arts classes.

But if you were maybe studying a science-based class, it might be 20 minutes into the kind of science area of town instead.

If you are more interested in a more modern single bedroom, possibly with en suite facilities as part of your accommodation, you're quite likely to be allocated somewhere like David Russell Apartments or Fife Park, which is a little bit further out of the historic part of St Andrews but still maybe 20 minutes walk away from most of the science buildings.

It might be 30 minutes walk into the centre of town for any of those humanities subjects that you might be studying.

Fife Park and David Russell Apartments is the newest set of accommodation buildings.

It has some wonderful facilities and when you're walking into classes in the morning, you'll find you're walking with lots of people that you recognise as well.

But there is also a bus, and there are also fantastic cycling lanes going into the centre of town too.

And so what your preferences are will, as I said, potentially change what style of accommodation building you're allocated, but also maybe where within St Andrews you'll be placed as well.

Lawrence, are there any single-gender halls or are they all co-ed?

Yeah, fantastic question, John.

So whilst there's no single hall of residence that's single gender, students can opt in for single-gender or mixed-gender halls depending on their preference.

And that will mean that if they're in a single-gender space, it will mean that all of their shared facilities, bathrooms, and kitchens will be shared with those of the same gender within their particular accommodation hall.

So there are some halls like University Hall which will be broken up into wings, which will generally correspond to a certain gender.

But most of our students probably stay in mixed-gender halls; where a student is sharing a bedroom, they'd never be expected to share a bedroom with anyone from a different gender or gender identity to them.

I think the other thing that's really important to note here is that if you have a really specific need, you really need to reach out to our accommodations team.

For instance, if you have food allergies, we do have halls that accommodate students with severe food allergies.

And maybe that's a good segue to talk about the food, because we talk about catered and self-catered, and the University of St Andrews is unique compared to a lot of UK universities.

Most UK universities do not have very many shared rooms if any, and they also don't often offer a catered plan.

Yeah, so absolutely it's a very unique position to be in within the UK university sector.

And that comes from being an older university with a more traditional approach to many of the buildings and the facilities that we have.

The food options, and I can attest to this myself, are really, really good at St Andrews.

Obviously Scotland's maybe not always famous for its gastronomy, but there is often an enormous amount of choice when you go to your breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals in your specific hall of residence.

And so you'll be expected to be in your hall wherever you're staying during your time and meals will be provided.

This includes breakfast, lunch, and dinner all throughout the working week and often on Saturdays as well.

And usually it's breakfast and lunch on Sunday.

So there are just one or maybe two meals per week that you'd be expected to provide for yourself.

There's always a small kitchenette in all of our catered accommodations, so there is still somewhere to store food and prepare simple meals as well.

As Sarah said, if you're looking for any specific need or have any additional requirements, it's really important to reach out to the accommodation team or declare them on your accommodation application form.

And we do have a special hall of residence and regular halls for those who might have allergies.

But also when you're thinking about things like vegetarianism or veganism, there's always going to be an option available for those different dietary requirements.

So it means that even if you don't have those requirements, there's still plenty of choice available for you as well.

And Sarah and I have stayed in the halls as well.

And they do an excellent job in labelling what foods are in anything.

So for those with allergies, it really is well done for them.

Yeah.

And another point, I think when you're thinking about what sort of hall you want, keep in mind what type of person you are, because halls are a really great way to get to know people.

Especially when you're coming in and you're far away from home, you're thinking about meeting people.

And although the thought of maybe a single room suits you more, keep in mind that if you're in a single room and you're making your own food, you're going to have a little less opportunities to really engage with a lot of people in your hall.

That's fine if that's the type of person you are and if you need that space.

But if you're the type of person that knows you're maybe not super outgoing, you're not going to put yourself out there if you're in a single room.

Keep that in mind because you do really want to give yourself the best option of meeting people and getting comfortable when you come to St Andrews.

Do you have anything to add to that John or Lawrence?

No, what I would add is that for those who are looking at budgets and costs and things like that, there's also a difference in the cost of different types of accommodation.

So again, sharing a room with a bathroom down the hall is going to be less expensive than having your own room with an ensuite bathroom.

And those are all very clearly labelled on the website.

So take a look at that and discuss that with your parents as you're considering what might be the best fit for you.

Hey, great.

Thank you, John, and thank you, Lawrence, for joining me today to talk about accommodations and residential halls.

Please reach out if we can be of any further help and join us for some of our other short recordings on a variety of topics.

Thanks for joining us.

Bye bye.

Welcome everybody.

My name is John Wells and we are here today to speak a little bit about student life in St Andrews.

I'm joined by my US-based colleague, Sarah Smith, and our Scottish-based colleague, Lawrence Skinner.

Sarah, if you want to introduce yourself and then we'll move on to Lawrence.

Sure.

Hi, everybody.

My name is Sarah Smith.

I'm one of the US regional managers.

I'm based in Colorado.

Happy to be here with you today because this is, I think, one of the topics that makes life at St Andrews so incredibly unique and fun.

So really happy to be here with Lawrence Skinner, who will take us through some of the slides.

Yeah.

Hi, guys.

Thank you so much for having me.

So my name is Lawrence.

I'm an admissions officer based in St Andrews in Scotland.

And yeah, we're going to talk a little bit about student life.

So you can see on my first slide here the wonderful scenes of Gaudi and the famous red gowns of St Andrews, which are also on Sarah's background.

I can see there too.

And this is just one of a number of unique features that make St Andrews a really wonderful and very community-orientated place to study as well.

So St Andrews is home to about 10,000 students, of which 8000 are undergraduates, and the town itself is only about double that number.

So it's about 22 or 24,000 people depending on how you count.

That means that it's really the epitome of a university or college town.

When you walk around town as a student, you are constantly bumping into friends that you recognise from your different classes, people that you know from your halls of residence, and quite often your teachers as well.

So it has that really nice intimate atmosphere here.

Because it's such a university-focused town, students really do engage with all of the social activities that the university has to offer.

So a wonderful example of that is a huge arrangement of clubs and societies.

Now we've got the number 150 there.

I think it varies between sort of 100 and 200, but there's an enormous number of ever-changing societies and clubs available at St Andrews.

The societies are those that are non-exclusive, focused around a specific topic or interest or sports, and they welcome students from all across the university who are interested in pursuing that or just learning a little bit more or just finding a way to make new friends as well.

The topics can vary from very kind of academic coding societies, ancient history societies, and classics and fintech and investment societies all the way down to the more obscure and the more interest-based.

There's obviously things like book clubs.

We have the oldest university debating society in the world, which has notes going back to the 1700s and lots of strange traditions attached to that.

But you'll also find societies like the Mediaeval Reenactment Society where students will don armour and hit each other with sticks and prepare feasts and guilds.

And there's very famously the Hole Digging Society at St Andrews where students might go to the beach, like West Sands behind John there, and just dig holes for an afternoon, dig trenches and then fill them in at the end of the day.

So there's a huge number of different kind of societies focused on interests, but also on employability, on developing academic skills as well.

So networking and also socialising at the same time.

There's a few different clubs available as well, certain ones that have long traditions of doing fashion shows and parades throughout the town, all of which add a little bit of colour to student life here too.

And these tie into some of the events that we have, varsity events in the sporting calendar, like our ice hockey varsity and our rugby varsity against the University of Edinburgh for example.

There's also a huge arrangement of different kind of musical performances that permeate the year with our wonderful Music Society members contributing to that, but also we entertain incoming professional performances.

Too often I say that you know your favourite pop star probably won't visit St Andrews, but your favourite author or academic might.

It's very often very common for us to get some wonderful guest speakers and have some wonderful seminars available on campus too.

There's what I like to define as sort of layers of support available for students at St Andrews, and probably the most important support network you have is our wonderful student community.

When you arrive into halls, you'll find that there's lots of students experiencing some degree of culture shock arriving to the university and with lots of different accents and backgrounds within that mix as well.

But everyone in that first couple of weeks is always trying to find their group, make new friends, and try out new things as well, which university anywhere is a wonderful opportunity to do.

There's also a number of layers of institutional support that we offer academically.

So we have academics who have office hours and can be contacted with any kind of questions.

One of the first things you do in St Andrews is have an advising meeting with an academic to establish what sort of academic pathway you want to pursue and maybe what subjects you'd like to pick up as part of that.

And also, we have our wonderful student services team delivered through what we call the Advice and Support Centre or the ASC as they like to be known, which is a very apt name.

That's where you can go for any kind of questions you have during your time around healthcare, around your studies, leaves of absence, accommodation inquiries, and anything to help you on your way to getting the most out of your student life and academic experience.

So this extends even to things like counselling, support, and mental health provision.

But accessing any of the other facilities and services available across the university is also their job too.

And then finally, the thing that really makes St Andrews a unique place to study are some of the traditions that we have here.

So going back to the previous slide, I mentioned the strange word called gaudi.

That is on the 30th of April every year.

Students will don their red gowns, optional but highly encouraged.

They'll light flaming torches and they'll do the traditional pier walk.

So this is what extends into the North Sea just next to St Andrews.

And it's a way of celebrating the life of a student who lost their life at sea a few hundred years ago.

But it also kicks off a night of festivities in the run up to May dip, which is the following morning where students will line up on the beach at dawn and when the sun rises in the east, they will all run into the sea to cleanse any academic sins they may have committed over the course of the year.

And it's a wonderful way of everyone in the university community kind of getting involved with something.

It's fair to say it's not very warm at that time of year, but it is a wonderful experience.

And if you are a bit afraid of getting extremely cold, then you can always stay behind and look after people's clothes as they dive into the water.

Another tradition is the academic families tradition at St Andrews.

So when you arrive into the university, you are quite literally adopted by older students who become your academic mother and father, or maybe many mothers or many fathers.

And these are third and fourth year students.

So students who have been at the university for two or three years, who understand the town, who understand the way it works.

And it's a wonderful way of getting that person, that contact that you can go to if you've got any questions; they'll leap you in and they'll point you in the right direction when you're struggling to find a lecture theatre or you need a place to find a certain ingredient of grocery.

So that's a wonderful way of making connections between the different year groups and establishing a kind of an academic lineage of students.

Often, you know, you'll find that you've got a long family tree of academic brothers and sisters and cousins and grandchildren by the time that you leave as well.

And that ties into Raisin weekend, the last of the kind of major traditions at St Andrews.

But this gives you a little bit of a flavour of the uniqueness of the university. Raisin established as a way to thank academic parents.

Traditionally you would give your parents a pound of raisins to thank them for welcoming you to the university.

And over the course of this weekend in October, you'll be given lots of challenges to do as a first year student.

So that could be running around a certain building or again, running into the sea or performing a certain challenge.

And it culminates in a foam fight on the morning of Raisin Monday.

So the following Monday, where students will often dress in kind of silly outfits, dragon costumes, witches, samurai or something interesting like that, and they will throw shaving foam at each other within the different academic families as well.

So it's a kind of induction into the university and a really wonderful way to join what is a remarkable community at St Andrews.

Thank you, Lawrence.

I think that the key here is that there's a lot to engage in.

Some of it obviously sounds a little quirky, but such a great way to come together with people from, you know, the 130 different countries that are attending St Andrews to really just feel like a St Andrews student makes for some excellent Instagram pictures.

Like that's the feedback John and I hear all the time.

It's like, oh my gosh, the traditions are so fun.

And this list is honestly partial.

Lawrence, do you mind telling us a little bit about the Welly Ball?

Because I think that's one that's quite fun for students.

Yeah.

So each formal event or ball will usually be attached to a certain society or academic school.

And so one of them is the Welly Ball where students will don very kind of formal attire on top traditionally if they can, but on the bottom, they'll wear welly boots, Wellington boots, which just gives it a different flavour to the others.

There's other ones where students might wear like hiking boots on the bottom as well.

And as I say, that's not an exhaustive list for any strand.

I think an important thing is these traditions are part of the shared experience of being at St Andrews.

And they really play into then how active and engaged alumni are from St Andrews as well.

Because if you go to an alumni event, people will ask you about your academic family or the pier walks or Raisin weekend.

These are things everyone shares who's been a student at St Andrews and adds to that very strong sense of community that makes St Andrews so unique.

If everyone gets asked, you don't have to worry about will I get in a family?

You will be asked to be in many families and you can kind of end up choosing; no one's feelings get hurt.

It's very inclusive and you can find an academic family that really suits your personality.

So if you want the crazy, going to all of these traditions and very social, you will find that.

If you're more the type that likes to maybe have a dinner and go to trivia night, you will find that.

So there's definitely something for everybody there.

All right, well, thank you very much, Lawrence.

It was a great short, brief presentation about traditions.

As we said, I think this is only part of what makes St Andrews so unique, but it certainly is a special part of the experience there.

And keep in mind, we will have other sessions available that you can look for on career support, student support, and sport and music at St Andrews.

So this is more of a wider overview of student life with the traditions.

But yeah, thank you so much, Lawrence.

That was really helpful.

Do have a look at our website because there's more videos and photos of all of these different traditions online.

Welcome everybody.

My name is John Wells and we are here today to speak a little bit about student life in St Andrews.

I'm joined by my US-based colleague, Sarah Smith, and our Scottish-based colleague, Lawrence Skinner.

Sarah, if you want to introduce yourself and then we'll move on to Lawrence.

Sure.

Hi, everybody.

My name is Sarah Smith.

I'm one of the US regional managers.

I'm based in Colorado.

Happy to be here with you today because this is, I think, one of the topics that makes life at St Andrews so incredibly unique and fun.

So really happy to be here with Lawrence Skinner, who will take us through some of the slides.

Yeah.

Hi, guys.

Thank you so much for having me.

So my name is Lawrence.

I'm an admissions officer based in St Andrews in Scotland.

And yeah, we're going to talk a little bit about student life.

So you can see on my first slide here the wonderful scenes of Gaudi and the famous red gowns of St Andrews, which are also on Sarah's background.

I can see there too.

And this is just one of a number of unique features that make St Andrews a really wonderful and very community-orientated place to study as well.

So St Andrews is home to about 10,000 students, of which 8000 are undergraduates, and the town itself is only about double that number.

So it's about 22 or 24,000 people depending on how you count.

That means that it's really the epitome of a university or college town.

When you walk around town as a student, you are constantly bumping into friends that you recognise from your different classes, people that you know from your halls of residence, and quite often your teachers as well.

So it has that really nice intimate atmosphere here.

Because it's such a university-focused town, students really do engage with all of the social activities that the university has to offer.

So a wonderful example of that is a huge arrangement of clubs and societies.

Now we've got the number 150 there.

I think it varies between sort of 100 and 200, but there's an enormous number of ever-changing societies and clubs available at St Andrews.

The societies are those that are non-exclusive, focused around a specific topic or interest or sports, and they welcome students from all across the university who are interested in pursuing that or just learning a little bit more or just finding a way to make new friends as well.

The topics can vary from very kind of academic coding societies, ancient history societies, and classics and fintech and investment societies all the way down to the more obscure and the more interest-based.

There's obviously things like book clubs.

We have the oldest university debating society in the world, which has notes going back to the 1700s and lots of strange traditions attached to that.

But you'll also find societies like the Mediaeval Reenactment Society where students will don armour and hit each other with sticks and prepare feasts and guilds.

And there's very famously the Hole Digging Society at St Andrews where students might go to the beach, like West Sands behind John there, and just dig holes for an afternoon, dig trenches and then fill them in at the end of the day.

So there's a huge number of different kind of societies focused on interests, but also on employability, on developing academic skills as well.

So networking and also socialising at the same time.

There's a few different clubs available as well, certain ones that have long traditions of doing fashion shows and parades throughout the town, all of which add a little bit of colour to student life here too.

And these tie into some of the events that we have, varsity events in the sporting calendar, like our ice hockey varsity and our rugby varsity against the University of Edinburgh for example.

There's also a huge arrangement of different kind of musical performances that permeate the year with our wonderful Music Society members contributing to that, but also we entertain incoming professional performances.

Too often I say that you know your favourite pop star probably won't visit St Andrews, but your favourite author or academic might.

It's very often very common for us to get some wonderful guest speakers and have some wonderful seminars available on campus too.

There's what I like to define as sort of layers of support available for students at St Andrews, and probably the most important support network you have is our wonderful student community.

When you arrive into halls, you'll find that there's lots of students experiencing some degree of culture shock arriving to the university and with lots of different accents and backgrounds within that mix as well.

But everyone in that first couple of weeks is always trying to find their group, make new friends, and try out new things as well, which university anywhere is a wonderful opportunity to do.

There's also a number of layers of institutional support that we offer academically.

So we have academics who have office hours and can be contacted with any kind of questions.

One of the first things you do in St Andrews is have an advising meeting with an academic to establish what sort of academic pathway you want to pursue and maybe what subjects you'd like to pick up as part of that.

And also, we have our wonderful student services team delivered through what we call the Advice and Support Centre or the ASC as they like to be known, which is a very apt name.

That's where you can go for any kind of questions you have during your time around healthcare, around your studies, leaves of absence, accommodation inquiries, and anything to help you on your way to getting the most out of your student life and academic experience.

So this extends even to things like counselling, support, and mental health provision.

But accessing any of the other facilities and services available across the university is also their job too.

And then finally, the thing that really makes St Andrews a unique place to study are some of the traditions that we have here.

So going back to the previous slide, I mentioned the strange word called gaudi.

That is on the 30th of April every year.

Students will don their red gowns, optional but highly encouraged.

They'll light flaming torches and they'll do the traditional pier walk.

So this is what extends into the North Sea just next to St Andrews.

And it's a way of celebrating the life of a student who lost their life at sea a few hundred years ago.

But it also kicks off a night of festivities in the run up to May dip, which is the following morning where students will line up on the beach at dawn and when the sun rises in the east, they will all run into the sea to cleanse any academic sins they may have committed over the course of the year.

And it's a wonderful way of everyone in the university community kind of getting involved with something.

It's fair to say it's not very warm at that time of year, but it is a wonderful experience.

And if you are a bit afraid of getting extremely cold, then you can always stay behind and look after people's clothes as they dive into the water.

Another tradition is the academic families tradition at St Andrews.

So when you arrive into the university, you are quite literally adopted by older students who become your academic mother and father, or maybe many mothers or many fathers.

And these are third and fourth year students.

So students who have been at the university for two or three years, who understand the town, who understand the way it works.

And it's a wonderful way of getting that person, that contact that you can go to if you've got any questions; they'll leap you in and they'll point you in the right direction when you're struggling to find a lecture theatre or you need a place to find a certain ingredient of grocery.

So that's a wonderful way of making connections between the different year groups and establishing a kind of an academic lineage of students.

Often, you know, you'll find that you've got a long family tree of academic brothers and sisters and cousins and grandchildren by the time that you leave as well.

And that ties into Raisin weekend, the last of the kind of major traditions at St Andrews.

But this gives you a little bit of a flavour of the uniqueness of the university. Raisin established as a way to thank academic parents.

Traditionally you would give your parents a pound of raisins to thank them for welcoming you to the university.

And over the course of this weekend in October, you'll be given lots of challenges to do as a first year student.

So that could be running around a certain building or again, running into the sea or performing a certain challenge.

And it culminates in a foam fight on the morning of Raisin Monday.

So the following Monday, where students will often dress in kind of silly outfits, dragon costumes, witches, samurai or something interesting like that, and they will throw shaving foam at each other within the different academic families as well.

So it's a kind of induction into the university and a really wonderful way to join what is a remarkable community at St Andrews.

Thank you, Lawrence.

I think that the key here is that there's a lot to engage in.

Some of it obviously sounds a little quirky, but such a great way to come together with people from, you know, the 130 different countries that are attending St Andrews to really just feel like a St Andrews student makes for some excellent Instagram pictures.

Like that's the feedback John and I hear all the time.

It's like, oh my gosh, the traditions are so fun.

And this list is honestly partial.

Lawrence, do you mind telling us a little bit about the Welly Ball?

Because I think that's one that's quite fun for students.

Yeah.

So each formal event or ball will usually be attached to a certain society or academic school.

And so one of them is the Welly Ball where students will don very kind of formal attire on top traditionally if they can, but on the bottom, they'll wear welly boots, Wellington boots, which just gives it a different flavour to the others.

There's other ones where students might wear like hiking boots on the bottom as well.

And as I say, that's not an exhaustive list for any strand.

I think an important thing is these traditions are part of the shared experience of being at St Andrews.

And they really play into then how active and engaged alumni are from St Andrews as well.

Because if you go to an alumni event, people will ask you about your academic family or the pier walks or Raisin weekend.

These are things everyone shares who's been a student at St Andrews and adds to that very strong sense of community that makes St Andrews so unique.

If everyone gets asked, you don't have to worry about will I get in a family?

You will be asked to be in many families and you can kind of end up choosing; no one's feelings get hurt.

It's very inclusive and you can find an academic family that really suits your personality.

So if you want the crazy, going to all of these traditions and very social, you will find that.

If you're more the type that likes to maybe have a dinner and go to trivia night, you will find that.

So there's definitely something for everybody there.

All right, well, thank you very much, Lawrence.

It was a great short, brief presentation about traditions.

As we said, I think this is only part of what makes St Andrews so unique, but it certainly is a special part of the experience there.

And keep in mind, we will have other sessions available that you can look for on career support, student support, and sport and music at St Andrews.

So this is more of a wider overview of student life with the traditions.

But yeah, thank you so much, Lawrence.

That was really helpful.

Do have a look at our website because there's more videos and photos of all of these different traditions online.

I am going to talk about student support at St Andrews and also health care in Scotland more generally.

Student services is a big team.

We offer a variety of services, including general advice and guidance on what it means to be a student in St Andrews and in Scotland.

There is also more specific support for students who might be suffering with poor mental health or students who need some help with budgeting and managing their money.

We have a great disability team, and I will share lots more information about them shortly, who provide advice and support to students who declare a disability to the university.

This includes their support plans for their academic schools as well.

We offer a great team of staff in our halls of residence who help with community building, general pastoral care, and well-being support for any students who are in one of our halls of residence.

We also have a health hub team who can provide guidance on how to access health care in the UK and make sure that students are pointed in the right direction when they are looking for help.

I think it is really important to say that we are not here to solve students' problems for them, but we are definitely here to help them solve problems.

We are with them along the way.

We really want students to develop a sense of personal responsibility for all aspects of their well-being.

As the slide says, we promote individuality, open-mindedness, and critical thinking.

We have a wonderfully diverse community here, and that is very important to us as well.

I mentioned our disability team earlier.

More than 20% of our students have actually disclosed a disability to the university, whether that is a disability or a long-term health condition that may affect their studies.

Our disability advisers will work with each student individually to assess their support needs and liaise with their academic schools to make sure that the right support plan is in place for their teaching and exam arrangements.

We will also work with our colleagues in the accommodation team and the timetabling team to make sure that our living and teaching spaces are appropriate.

I would, however, add that we are a very old university in a very old town, and there are some limitations in terms of what we can do in some circumstances.

It is also important to note that there may be differences in the academic adjustments you might be used to in your home country and school compared to those that are standard in the UK.

The best thing to do is to get in touch really early, chat with one of our disability advisers, and gain an understanding of what could be put in place, the kind of things that we can do, and the support we provide.

There is a link to an online inquiry form that we ask you to fill in, and then one of the team will be back in touch to chat with you.

But again, I would say the earlier the better.

Moving on to our general student life advice, we recognize that being a student isn't always easy.

All of our students will come up against some challenges during their time in St Andrews, so we have an advice and support center.

We call it the ASC.

They are currently based on North Street and are open Monday to Friday for drop-in inquiries.

Anyone can drop in and ask a question, and that includes the public and families as well.

We also have some specialized teams.

I have already talked about the money team.

They can provide advice on opening a bank account in the UK, budgeting, and payment options.

They also have access to a number of different funds and short-term loans.

Students who get into financial difficulties can make an application to the university.

It is means-tested, and where necessary, there is financial support available for short-term issues.

Our health team provides general health information and advice about accessing health care.

I have some more slides on that coming up shortly.

Our wonderful well-being team works with students on a wide variety of general student issues.

They help with imposter syndrome, which is the need to feel that you have to do everything perfectly when you get here, and something everyone suffers from.

They also assist with homesickness, which is a common issue for many students, struggling with time management, and general stress and anxiety from living away from home.

Being so far away from family, living in a strange country, and navigating a new place can bring up all kinds of challenges.

Our services are available to any student.

It does not matter what course they are doing, their background, or their age; we are open to everyone.

Interestingly, I have been involved in the orientation program for the university for many years, and there used to be separate events just for international students.

However, international students told us they just wanted to be treated like any other student and did not want to be singled out.

That is not to say that we don't recognize international students will have particular issues they might be struggling with, such as homesickness and culture shock.

It is not just the Scottish culture; it could also be the Scottish weather.

For students coming from places that are normally warm and sunny with lots of daylight, a Scottish winter can be a huge culture shock.

I say that as someone who came from England, which is not that far away.

Yes, our services are open to everyone, and we really encourage students to get in touch early.

As soon as they are feeling a little bit of discomfort with something, they should come and have a chat.

It is much better to talk it out early and know what support is available than to wait until things come to a head and feel overwhelming.

The earlier they reach out, the better, so they can know that they are not alone and that it is very common to have those feelings and challenges about being here.

Speaking more generally about the support from our well-being, counseling, and mental health teams, they are three separate teams, but they work very closely together.

I should clarify that our support, particularly our counseling and mental health support, is not clinical.

We are not a clinical service and rely on the National Health Service for that.

However, we have trained professionals, including professional counselors and mental health specialists, who work with students.

The support will generally be short-term.

Not always, but most of the time, we are just trying to help a student get over an issue that they are dealing with.

Our well-being team will have guidance chats with students experiencing mild, low-level difficulties.

They offer time to talk things through and discuss some solutions.

We offer coaching to students who might want help with a particular issue, and we also run a number of really popular positive psychology and well-being workshops.

Those workshops look at topics like how not to be a perfectionist, how not to procrastinate, anxiety, and so on.

They offer really good ideas about how to deal with these things.

We find the workshops are helpful because students sit with peers and realize they are not alone, as many other students are dealing with the same challenges.

When a student is experiencing something a little more significant, such as a bereavement, a health issue, or something affecting their lives much more deeply than general well-being issues, we will refer the student into counseling.

There are a range of therapeutic approaches and interventions that we offer, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, in a very safe, supportive, and non-judgmental space.

These might be one-to-one sessions, but sometimes specialized workshops are also really relevant and helpful.

Finally, our mental health team supports students who have a mental health diagnosis.

The team helps coordinate their care with the National Health Service and any other related services.

They also work with them on distress tolerance and coping strategies so they can really make the most of their time in St Andrews.

We do crisis support as well, recognizing that there are times when everything just gets a little bit too much.

Before I move on to talk about halls life, I want to go back to John's comment about incoming international students.

We recognize that, particularly for first-year students, there is something we call the W curve.

I don't know if you have heard about this, but students arrive and it is all very exciting and new because they have been waiting for this for ages.

That is the top of the W.

Then, all of a sudden, it gets a little bit real, homesickness sets in, and maybe they start to feel overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do.

The standards seem a bit higher, and they feel like everyone else is so bright and doing really well, although that is not always true.

Then they go home at Christmas at the end of that first semester, and they feel like they made it.

It is all wonderful, and that is the other top point of the W.

Then they come back and start to second-guess themselves because they had a great time at home, but now they are back and don't quite know where they belong.

Eventually, at the end of the second semester, closing out their full first academic year, it is smooth sailing.

Everything feels comfortable and normal again.

We recognize that pattern in our services, and it is just to reassure everyone that those feelings are completely normal.

I appreciate that, Penny.

I think it has gone from being called a U curve when I started in the field to a W curve now.

This recognizes that it is not one smooth path the whole way through, but rather full of ups and downs.

Yes, absolutely.

Especially for international students who go back at Christmas, they return to somewhere familiar.

It is wonderful to see family and friends, and they have a great time, but then they have to come back.

Those transitions can be quite consequential.

This segues really nicely into talking about halls life.

The vast majority of our first-year students will live in a university hall of residence.

Student services has teams in each of those residences led by a warden, alongside anywhere between three and 12 assistant wardens who live in the residence with the students.

They are there to create a friendly, welcoming, family-feel hall community.

Each of the halls also has elected student representatives who are in charge of the social, fun activities.

Our wardens also put on some lovely events, usually revolving around hot chocolate, occasional puppy visits, and other wonderful things.

They are also available for drop-in chats.

They have office hours every evening where you can pop into the warden's office and have a chat about anything.

They are there to help with roommate issues, conflicts in the shared kitchens, or whatever else might be happening in the hall.

They are also on call at night for health emergencies, as well as during the day on the weekends.

There is always someone at the end of a phone.

If you are a student in a residence and you have a problem and need to talk to someone, there will be someone there for you.

Whether it is a welfare and well-being issue or a problem with the room itself, there is always somebody you can call.

The Halls Life team does a wonderful job.

For international students who don't go home at Christmas and choose to stay, there are events every day of the winter break.

This includes a Christmas lunch, a New Year's Eve party, and many other wonderful activities.

That care is always there.

I am going to move on now and talk a little bit about health care in Scotland.

Obviously, it will be different from everyone's home countries.

In the UK, health care is provided by the National Health Service, which is widely known by the acronym NHS.

It is important to note that, unlike in some other countries, you cannot access a specialist without a referral from your primary care doctor.

We call them GPs in the UK, which stands for general practitioner.

You will be registered with a GP, and if you need a referral for secondary specialist care, your GP will make that referral for you.

For non-urgent care in the UK, we are used to waiting to see a medical professional.

However, there is a number you can call at your doctor's office, normally in the morning, and they will do a triage assessment to determine whether you need an immediate appointment or whether it can wait a few days.

There is private health care in the UK, but not necessarily for all specialties.

I would recommend checking your health insurance or private health care provider at home to see if you are covered when you are overseas.

It is also important to note that access to the mental health services of the NHS is often based on urgent care needs.

Being able to see a psychiatrist or a psychologist is something where you would normally be placed on a waiting list, unless there is a really urgent situation going on.

We do ask all new students to be vaccinated before they arrive.

This is particularly important for measles, mumps, and rubella, as well as all strains of meningitis.

Getting lots of young people from all over the world together at the start of an academic year and moving them into shared halls can be a challenging time from a health perspective.

Freshers' flu is something that people in the UK are really familiar with.

It mostly consists of colds and coughs that go around, and we don't want it to be anything more serious than that.

Please do get yourself vaccinated before you come.

We ask that every student arriving in St Andrews registers with one of our primary care practices when they get here.

In St Andrews, there are two practices based at our community hospital, and you register according to your last name.

The practices have split the student population between them for ease of processing so many newcomers arriving at the same time, but you can always move from one to the other.

We also ask that all of our students have a UK SIM card in their phone.

Without it, it will be very difficult to access local emergency services.

If you call for medical assistance, they will not be able to call you back unless you have a UK number.

It is really important that as soon as you get here, you get your UK SIM card in place.

As I mentioned, our local community hospital is open during the day.

It has a minor injury service, so if you have a problem, they will treat you there.

We also have a nighttime telephone service available.

Overnight, you can call for advice, and if necessary, they will refer you to an emergency care department to be seen immediately.

Helpfully, our local pharmacies provide advice for minor ailments.

You can go in and speak to a pharmacist without even going to the doctor, and they will be able to prescribe medication depending on what it is.

For minor ailments, injuries, and illnesses, speaking with one of our pharmacists is probably the quickest and easiest way to access care.

Our specialist and emergency care hospitals are located either in Dundee, which is 12 miles away, or in Kirkcaldy, which is 26 miles away.

However, if needed, our students will generally be taken to the hospital in Dundee.

If you have a chronic health condition, we ask you to check what treatment is available in the UK before you come.

You can always get in touch with our health team to chat about that and get some guidance.

From a private care perspective, we do have a local private GP practice.

They are not common in the UK, but we are very lucky to have one, so that is always an option.

There is also a private hospital in Edinburgh if needed.

Finally, I want to talk a bit about medication.

If you are a student who has prescribed medication, it is really important to find out ahead of time if you are going to be able to get that same medication in the UK.

Our formulary is quite different; there may be something similar that can replace it, but it is essential to check.

If you are planning on bringing medication with you, you should always check the UK government website to see what is allowed into the country.

There are some controlled substances that you will not be able to bring in.

Medical evidence confirming a diagnosis from your home physician will be really important.

When you come and see a doctor in the UK, you can share that documentation with them so they can understand what you have been taking and why.

Not having that evidence will delay you in getting a prescription.

In the UK, you can only get prescribed medication from a UK doctor, or a pharmacist in some specific situations.

Finally, please do not mail medication.

This is a note for the moms, dads, and carers: please do not mail medication from overseas into the UK because it will more than likely be confiscated by our customs team.

You can travel in with it yourself, and then you can speak to your GP when you arrive to set up your prescription through the NHS.

That is all of my information about student support and health care.

Do you have any other questions, John or Karen?

That was great.

I feel like it covered a lot of the questions we normally get, certainly about medication.

I think having a plan to have yourself covered for the first semester, and then getting your next batch when you go home for Christmas break if needed, is very smart.

I think it is all very helpful, Penny.

St Andrews is very proud of the kinds of services you and your team provide.

Thank you, John.

I am very lucky to work with a tremendous team of people who are committed to making the experience of being in St Andrews the best it can be for every student, while recognizing that there will always be ups and downs in life.

What we strive to do is help students navigate those challenges.

As they navigate them, they are actually gaining the skills they will need to handle life more generally when they leave St Andrews in the future.

Thank you very much, Penny.

Hi everybody.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

Today we're going to be talking about career support, the support you can access during your studies at St Andrews, but also after you graduate.

My name is Michaela.

I am the Regional Manager for European Admissions and I'm joined here by Clemmy, who's going to talk a little bit about herself, her background, and then introduce us to the amazing support we have available.

Thanks, Michaela.

Hi, I'm Clemmy.

I'm an opportunities manager covering the UK and Europe geographical region for the Career Centre.

So, I work to engage employers in creating and accessing opportunities for our students and graduates with employers across the European continent and here in the UK.

And I have colleagues who have similar remits covering other continents, so that across the world we've got various connections that our students and graduates can access, as well as colleagues of lots of different sorts who I will mention as I go through the various services that the Career Centre provides.

So, the career support available at the university is a huge range of resources which, as Michaela mentioned, are available to current students, undergraduates, postgraduates, everybody, and much of which is available after graduation and onwards throughout your life once you are a St Andrews graduate.

The objective is obviously to enhance our students' and graduates' prospects throughout their careers in building, changing, and developing the paths that they take in the future.

This is embedded through the curriculum as well as through the specific resources that are available through the Career Centre and through the work that different academic departments do to connect with employers in their specific sectors.

So altogether, we use all the resources the university has, including a wonderful network of alumni and friends of the University, to make sure that you can access the support that you want to build the future that you aspire to.

And this produces particularly good statistics for St Andrews graduates in terms of their future and employability after they leave St Andrews.

And we have a rate of 93% of our graduates who are in employment or in further study or education 15 months following graduation.

I'll explain more about that later.

So this is, on a slightly dreary day, a photo of the Careers Centre building where a lot of our services run from, although we've obviously also got an awful lot online and it's available to students whether they are physically in the university town or not.

The overall mission is to help students go through the journey that they might take at the university in terms of understanding what they want to achieve in life, the kind of life that they want to build, and to be educated and inspired about the options they have available and empowered to try and find and take those opportunities when they come up.

We try to build people's skills and understanding in managing the career paths that are available to them so that people can achieve very fulfilling careers and achieve whatever their ambitions might be across all sorts of different sectors and geographies and lifestyles.

So, the career service will be available to you right from the start of your time at St Andrews.

All of the resources are available to you for three years following graduation, and then the online resources are available to our graduates forever.

So, you will always have St Andrews to come back to for any career support that you need throughout your life.

Can I ask, Clemmy?

So, you say that there is three years after you graduate that you can still access the support.

What sort of support do you often see students who have already graduated access?

Do they have to be in St Andrews physically to take advantage of it?

So, you don’t.

So, everything is available in some form to our graduates, most of whom, although not all, will move on geographically from St Andrews.

So, everything is available in a form that is accessible to those students.

We have a lot of relatively new graduates realizing perhaps they could have made better advantage of the career service while they were a student and then coming back in that sort of period afterwards when there's more of an understanding, maybe, of the jobs market that they are seeking entry to.

So, we do literally everything: all the sort of careers guidance that I'll be talking through, all of the interview and CV prep, and everything for the big picture questions and the kind of nuts and bolts of how to make that progress.

So, that's all available through equivalent online appointments and services, just like it would be physically for the students who are undergraduates who are physically in St Andrews.

The core services that the career service provide are built around the idea of career management and take you through that journey from initial ideas through to applications and securing jobs and then potentially moving on from there.

Obviously, there is career guidance which involves appointments with our qualified careers advisors, many of whom are St Andrews alumni, some of whom have postgraduate qualifications from St Andrews and have a really good understanding of the experience of the students.

And they will work with the students to identify what their goals might be, what paths might be appropriate for them, and how to achieve the goals that they want to, as well as what work to do during their studies to enhance their skills and experience and present that to potential employers.

So, you can have a series of career guidance sessions with our careers advisors.

We've also got resources like CV advisors, and you can have advice sessions built around things like how to present yourself on LinkedIn to best enhance your visibility to potential employers and advice around each stage of applications.

So, that involves things like mock interview appointments you can have with a careers advisor, but also preparation for an assessment centre or psychometric tests, and so on and so forth.

So, there is throughout that kind of process the level of support that the student might want or need.

But obviously, all of this is at the request of the students.

So, you work out what might work for you.

But we also have quite a lot of students who kind of come in not really knowing what help they want, and we can lead them through that process.

What time of my studies should I start to access this?

For example, if I'm doing a four-year degree, I might think that this is maybe something I should do in my fourth year.

But do you have advice even for younger, first-year students?

Yeah, absolutely.

Everything is available broadly to everyone.

And we encourage students to get invested in thinking about their future career and their time after St Andrews as early as possible, while making sure that doesn't compromise the experience that they have while they are here.

But it's something to be thinking about all along.

So, it's useful to come along pretty much as soon as you get here.

But we're very aware that your career concept will be developing during your time as a student.

So, the earlier the better, the more the better.

But we're there to provide that support at whatever stage it's needed.

And obviously, it's fairly common for some students to leave it relatively late in the day.

Like I said, sometimes people have graduated before they really think about the help that we can provide.

And so, we've got different plans and journeys, and we have online resources which have things like timetables of suggestions for things you could do at different stages during your studies to help you think about and build towards your career decisions and to make you as desirable as an applicant as possible to whatever it is that your career aspirations might be at that point.

And postgraduate students, do they also get to access all of the same resources even though they're with St Andrews only for a year?

Yeah.

So, obviously there are lots of different types of students: undergraduates, postgraduates.

We have students who do a year abroad or a semester abroad at St Andrews, but their base is somewhere else.

We have postgraduate taught students who are here for a year or for a PhD and end up here for many years.

The same resources are available to everybody.

There are some opportunities that are really targeted.

So, I'll talk a bit about internships, and some of them are aimed at students at a specific stage, but the broad availability of all our resources is for everybody.

And even if it is a semester of a degree based somewhere else, you'll still have access to the same resources now and once you have left St Andrews.

So hopefully, through all of that, we get students feeling they have some sort of control over the future careers that they're trying to build.

They've got some confidence, got some skills, and got access to all the tools that they need to start taking those steps into their future.

And within that, we want students to be able to start taking those steps and have lots of opportunities to develop their skills and develop their understanding of the worlds of work they might want to go into.

So, we have opportunities for career development in lots of different ways.

Again, we've got things that are online, we've got things that are in person and on campus, and all sorts of different opportunities there.

We have lots of major employers coming to St Andrews, so we have careers fairs where they'll come and have stands and you can casually chat to different employers.

We'll have talks and webinars.

Often, we'll have alumni coming to talk about their career journeys that they've had through different sectors since they've left St Andrews.

We have events both in person and online that might explain a bit about the realities of different worlds of work.

We've also got lots of networking opportunities, particularly through our alumni and friends at the university who are around the world.

And we have something we refer to as our career treks, which happen in North America and are now going to be happening in London as well, and potentially more places in the future, which involve taking groups of students around to employers.

So, you get to actually see those workplaces, see those environments, speak to real employees, and find out more about the realities of different working paths and different opportunities.

And that will hopefully mean that there is a complement of online resources, St Andrews on-campus resources, but also opportunities that take students more directly out into the worlds that they're building for their futures.

We definitely have people really worried about the fact that St Andrews is not in the City of London—that we are maybe slightly more removed from where they perceive all of the action happens.

But you're sort of bringing employers on campus and bringing students to those financial centres and centres of different industries.

So actually, even though the campus itself is maybe a little bit more removed, that's not going to impact necessarily how many opportunities you get.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, obviously the reputation of St Andrews opens some doors that are not on the doorstep.

And I'm sure the prospective students will be hearing all about the lifestyle of St Andrews and being a student here, which would counterbalance any negative they might perceive anyway about the geography.

But I don't think it is really a limitation, and there are lots of opportunities that are advertised, for example, to our students that might be in London, Paris, New York, wherever.

And we've also got some opportunities through things like an employability bursary to support students financially with the costs of travelling to specific opportunities.

So, the geography is not a limitation, and it's certainly an asset in lots of ways.

And we do have lots of employers who are keen to come and talk to our students.

So, they do come on campus.

And we have, as you say, tried to create those opportunities for the students to go to them where it is something more location-specific.

So, I think the students have lots of opportunities to cross those boundaries and get whatever opportunities they want.

And we've spoken about internships, and I wanted to ask if you could give us some examples of what sort of internships people have done in the past.

And do they do them during the school year when their classes are happening, or do they do internships during the summer?

So, the internships are predominantly during the holiday weeks in the winter and in the summer.

We have opportunities within St Andrews, and there are internships that are offered internally and paid for students.

So, there are experiences of the professional aspects of the university itself and of local businesses and sectors.

There are also internships with various employers that are available, sometimes specifically for St Andrews students or available through the university in the Career Centre, and they cover all sorts of possible opportunities you could have.

Some of them, as I've mentioned, are available specifically to specific groups of students—so for example, to penultimate year students or to postgraduate students.

But they sort of will fit for whoever wants them.

And they are also global.

So again, people can sort of seek to set what their objectives are and then try things out through the internships.

But it's very available, and we have equivalent experiences for people at different stages.

So for example, we've got a programme aimed at first years, which is at an earlier stage and working on employability skills and understanding what they might want to achieve during their time studying at St Andrews.

That includes a micro-internship which is more appropriate to that sort of life stage before working towards the bigger internship.

So for example, we might have a 10-week one which takes place over the summer holidays, whereas a micro-internship might only be a day or a few days, and that's potentially something that's available more locally.

We've also got access to lots of opportunities through our alumni networks.

So, we've got something, for example, called Career Connect, where recent and not-so-recent alumni make themselves available to students for sort of informal networking or mentoring type relationships.

And they'll have an online coffee to have a chat through potential career aspirations or experiences that the alumni has had, as well as creating specific opportunities like internships that can be advertised to our students.

And we have opportunities all over the world in every possible sector.

We have people going to development opportunities in marine biology off the coast of Africa.

We've got local experiences here in St Andrews or Edinburgh or anywhere, really.

So, the alumni network, being such an international and diverse student body, creates this diverse world of graduates who therefore support and encourage our students into the opportunities that they aspire to.

So, how many people are actually on the Career Connect website?

So, we have thousands of alumni and friends of the university—people like parents and those who are connected—who create these opportunities on our portal, which is Career Connect, which I will talk more about in a minute.

The Coffee Connect and the specific mentoring programme each year sees hundreds of students sign up, and we have hundreds of alumni and friends of the university.

And we have a process of reviewing the students' goals in terms of the sectors they want to work in and the geographies they want to work in, and matching them up to alumni and friends of the university who've got the relevant insight to help students understand the realities of it, what it's going to be like, what are the right paths, and how best to get those opportunities.

So, some of the resources are online in particular.

And so, for example, I mentioned the timelines that are available, which can give kind of a loose guidance to students to think about what steps they might want to take at different points in their studies in order to enhance the opportunities that are going to be available to them later on.

And that's obviously not mandatory, but just gives indications for those who perhaps don't feel ready to come for a specific career guidance session and get personalised advice.

We've got recruitment timelines so you can get an understanding of the employer's perspective on that and work out how different sectors might recruit.

So for example, in the UK, the legal sector will tend to recruit two years in advance, so applying during your studies is helpful.

Whereas with some opportunities, like some publishers, they recruit on a very rolling basis.

So, you aren't going to be submitting an application until you are ready to take up the opportunity.

You need to think more in advance about how to get ready to make the application.

So, we have information available to help guide you based on where you want to end up and how you should be approaching that while you are a student.

And we have resources like Graduates First, which have lots of online resources like interview preparation advice and practice tests.

And so Saint Connect, one of our portals, that's an alumni network where all these recent alumni, graduates, parents, and friends of the university set out a bit about who they are and what they're working in so that current students and other recent graduates can try and find people who've got the connections they want to work on.

People seem to find the experience of studying at St Andrews so wildly enriching that they stay really connected to the university and want to keep helping the students.

And that's why I've ended up working here again as alumni, because that connection feels so strong.

So, people really do want to help, and we use our Saint Connect portal to make sure that that's really accessible for students and new graduates to try to build those connections and start networking towards the careers that they want to have.

One of the ways that the university, both the Career Centre and more widely, is looking at making sure that our students are as employable as they can be when they get to the stage of wanting to be employed is through our graduate attributes principles.

A key one is social responsibility.

So, these principles are embedded within the curriculum and in all sorts of employability opportunities, experiences through the internships, etc.

So, you can see the principles that are underpinning our work in terms of skill development for the undergraduates, postgraduates, and everyone who has contact with us.

So under social responsibility, we're looking particularly around diversity and making sure that that's understood in a meaningful way by our students, and that they're able to talk about all of these skills and attributes in applications, in job interviews, and living with them throughout their careers.

The entrepreneurial mindset is attached to various opportunities.

We have the Entrepreneurship Centre.

Students are encouraged to be thinking about their goals in a broad and active sense, recognising opportunities, thinking about skills and problem solving.

There are leadership skills, as you might expect, thinking about that in a really broad sense and what it means for students at various stages of their studies.

So, that is self-leadership and leadership of others, organisation, and so on.

And that's something we talk to students about from a really early stage in terms of developing the skills that are going to lead them through their own lives as well as their careers.

And of course, our global outlook, which is really intrinsic in St Andrews because we have such a diverse international community of students, staff, and through the town.

So, that is through engagement with different cultures and kind of cultural literacy which employers particularly value.

We hear more and more from employers about the importance of that kind of global outlook as well as all of these other attributes.

So, exciting stats now just to underline that the things I have been saying are actually true.

St Andrews is part of the UK National Graduate Outcome survey.

Students report 15 months after their graduation on where they are at in their lives at that point, which is taken to be a really good understanding of what happens in those stages after graduation.

And for St Andrews graduates, 15 months after graduation, 93.6% of them are in work or in further study, which is a really high statistic.

18% are going on into further study; 65% talk about applying what they've learned in their studies in their lives at that point.

Obviously, that's sometimes about the content of their studies and sometimes it's about the skills that they've built up while they have been studying directly through the curriculum and more broadly through any extracurricular activities or co-curricular activities they've done while they have been studying with us.

We have 82%, more than four-fifths, saying that their current activity at that stage—their further study or their work—aligns with the plans that they ultimately have for their careers.

So, they're not only in work or study, but they are still working towards the goals that they have for themselves.

And our graduates have, just on that one year's stats, gone on into employment in 32 different countries around the world.

I think that's a really interesting statistic—the 32 countries—because you guys deal with students applying to all these different countries.

So, you really actually know the difference between what a market needs in the US versus what an employer might be looking at in Germany.

So, even though we're based in the UK, you guys have a global knowledge of what the differences are.

So, you're not just supporting people looking to stay in the UK.

You can absolutely support people who have a global outlook as well, right?

Absolutely.

There are no barriers in terms of nationalities for the work that we do.

So, as I've mentioned, my remit is primarily looking at the UK and Europe.

I have colleagues looking at Asia and North America, and we look at opportunities everywhere around the world and have that sort of insight that we're getting through alumni and through all the employer conversations.

We have to track developments of different job markets and industries and how that varies between countries.

So, there's no assumption that students will either go to their home country for their next steps after graduation or that they will stay in the UK.

People can do what works for them.

And so some people, we have international students who remain in the UK.

We have British students who go abroad after graduation, or international students who go to a different country than their home country for their next steps.

And we can support people on all of those paths and to explore the paths and work out what is right for them.

So, some examples: some of the places our graduates have gone on to work.

You can see lots of major employers; every continent has St Andrews graduates working in it.

And if you have a look at the LinkedIn alumni network of St Andrews, you will see we are everywhere, in all sorts of rooms that you might find yourself in.

So, being a St Andrews graduate is going to help you go into employers of all of these big brands, and also you would be able to find alumni, for example through our Saint Connect portal, to talk to and get some insights about how to build those connections.

Some of them will even have schemes to specifically encourage graduates of the same universities in.

So hopefully, that is some of the inspiration that helps the students to build their futures.

So in overview, the Career Centre offers all sorts of different tools for students to build towards their futures.

Basic kind of nuts and bolts, practical stuff about how to write a CV or a resume, and how that's different in different countries or in different sectors in terms of what is expected and what is viewed well.

And to build confidence towards, for example, being able to sit an interview perhaps in a country with whose employment processes you're less familiar.

We've got all sorts of opportunities managers creating opportunities around the world, giving you access to different markets as a potential employee.

We have events here, and we have events in other countries which students can access in order to build a bit of a picture of what they want in their future.

There are lots of resources online and in person in St Andrews and elsewhere.

And we have the careers fair where employers come to the students, and then we have lots of online events and networking events through things like work shadowing through the alumni networks, etc.

So, all in all, there is a lot of support from the first day arriving in St Andrews through the studies, the first three years after graduation just on the same basis as our current students, and then onwards forever in terms of the online resources being available and all of that support network through alumni available for life.

So finally, just to sort of flag, if you have specific questions for someone in the career centre, we have not listed the details of every career advisor.

So, you can't get too specific a question on that basis until you are a student here.

But if you have areas of interest that you'd like to pick up on and find out more about what we do, particularly in geographical regions, we have them.

So, our employers can contact us at the top email address and for broader inquiries about the career centre and how it works.

And you might want to access, as soon as you arrive, the careers email address.

And then we've got details of myself, Clemmy, and my colleagues Jonathan, Ellen, and Kirsty, who have different geographical remits.

You'll see Ellen is also the contact for postgraduate opportunities and Kirsty also looks specifically at the Business School.

So, we've got particularly deep and well-guided connections for students in those brackets.

And for anything connected to the alumni networks, our colleagues in the development team can help.

I know that people might still have questions, so the fact that there are those email addresses for people to reach out to is great.

But remember, once you arrive on campus, you can arrive in the Career Centre right after doing all of the key things like getting your visa checked.

So, you do not need to worry about this right now.

But of course, if you do want to engage straight away during freshers' week, during the first month, or first semester, the team are there for you.

As you can hear, you know, they're doing so many different things—reaching out to you actively, but also there for you to approach.

So, thank you so much, Clemmy, for talking us through this.

And if you do have any more questions, please feel free to reach out to admissions or to the careers team, and we're always here to help if needed.

Hi everybody, my name is Michaela.

I am the regional manager for Europe within the admissions team at the University of St Andrews.

And I'm very delighted that you're here today, that you're listening to our presentation.

We're going to talk about sports and what sports are like at the University of St Andrews, and we're joined by Duncan, who is a fantastic guest.

So I will let you, Duncan, introduce yourself and start our presentation.

Thank you very much for the opportunity.

Yes, my name is Duncan Caithness and I'm an assistant director here at St Sport.

I grew up in St Andrews playing sport.

I love sport, I love St Andrews, so it's really fun for me to speak to you about sport at St Andrews.

We have so many different things for so many different people, and I hope that at the end of this presentation we've covered everything that you might want to know about sport during your time in the town.

Many people will know St Andrews is the home of golf.

It absolutely is.

It's a fantastic place to learn and play golf.

But it's actually home to so many other things to do with sport.

And there is so much more than golf in St Andrews.

And we're going to take you through all the different opportunities during the course of this presentation and tell you everything that we think you need to know about sport in St Andrews.

So the facilities themselves, we have lots of wonderful facilities inside and outside.

We have two recently installed Astro turf pitches which host a number of our different sports clubs, hockey, football, rugby, lacrosse, and shinty.

We have 53 which we'll talk about shortly.

We have an indoor tennis centre.

We have a modern gym which is actually going through some upgrades over the summer.

So we've got lots of exciting things happening there, a number of different health and fitness classes each week, a dance studio, a climbing wall, and some absolutely fantastic outdoor space where a lot of our teams will train.

And we host lots of professional sports teams as we go as well.

And sometimes people wonder how far away from the centre of town these facilities are.

Is it like right in town or do they have to take the bus?

No, that's one of the beauties of St Andrews, that most things are in walking distance.

So from the town centre you're around about, depending where you are, about 15 minutes or so max to the sports centre at St Sport.

So everything is within walking distance.

So yeah, everything is right on hand, so no bus is required.

That's ideal.

That's perfect.

In between classes you can jump to the gym.

That's great, absolutely.

And we have a lot of students who'll come to the gym and use the cafe to do some studying in between classes, gym, and all these things.

So yeah, it's a very welcoming place.

So club sport is massive at the University of St Andrews.

We have 53 clubs, the newest of which is a Gaelic football club who affiliated this year, so they're a really welcome addition.

We have extremely high participation rates at the university, so over 50% of the students are engaged in sport or activity in some way.

So our sports club membership has 43% of the student population as part of a club and that's fantastic, and it's actually the highest in Scotland and something that we're extremely proud of.

We think a lot of that is down to the fact we have so many.

We have 53, there are so many different sports, and each of them caters for a really big range of abilities and ambitions.

So there really is something for everybody within St Sport.

So the sport in St Andrews is fantastic, and one of the fantastic things that runs alongside that is the social circle and the networks that people create.

It really is one big family here within St Sport.

There are so many different students that we see on a daily, weekly basis, they pop in all the time.

It's just such a friendly and welcoming place with so many wonderful people coming through the doors each day.

So, so many people have met their best friends through sport that they may not have met had they not tried a new sport at our Freshers Fair, for example.

So we really see the value in sport and the power in sport, that it's an opportunity to make some lifelong friends.

Volunteering is another thing that we are really big on at St Sport, and each of our 53 clubs are run by student volunteers.

There are so many opportunities for them to learn new skills and to develop and become more employable.

We really support the students with that and, in addition to the club sport volunteering, we have local volunteering programmes within St Andrews with our Junior Saints, which is a local children's programme for primary schools and secondary schools.

Many of our clubs will help us deliver that.

We also have really good programmes abroad, one of which being Volunteer Zambia.

Each year between four and six students will work with university students from Edinburgh, from Stirling, and a number of other institutions across the UK to go out to Zambia where they'll be there for the summer, introducing children in Zambia to sport and also working with local coaches and governing bodies out there.

So we go out there and we work with sports such as netball, basketball, and football to help increase participation and also to help develop the coaches in those countries.

So a really fantastic opportunity for our students.

Can I ask a question around what level of proficiency does a student need to have in the sport to join it at university?

Because like looking at, say, the United States, a lot of the time only people who are already really good at the sport can participate in it.

But our participation rates are so high that surely just anybody can join if they want to, right?

Absolutely anybody.

And that's one of the great things we have here is that we have so many different activities, so many different sports to cater for all levels.

So it's really common for people to come here having never played a sport before.

And by the time they leave, they've joined two or three different sports clubs.

So yeah, you do not have to be an expert in your sport whatsoever.

Our clubs are friendly, they're welcoming, and they cater for all levels.

That said, we do have some exceptionally talented athletes here.

But no, you do not have to have any experience to join our clubs.

There are so many, and it is common for people to join more than one.

People will come to the sports fair at the start of the year to have a walk around our facilities and they will learn about all these different sports and activities.

And it's a really fantastic event and one at which we hope we'll see some of you.

Looking at this list here, we've got some pretty cool clubs.

Our fencing team, for example, have just come home from Loughborough crowned British champions in their sport.

We have our surfing club who are planning for their trip to Morocco.

We have a snow sports club who travel all over the country, have a fantastic social scene, but it's not all about that.

Every one of these clubs I could go through and tell you a fantastic story about them, but we'd be here all day.

I suppose I could sum it up by telling you that there are so many different opportunities for you, and we encourage people to try multiple activities and find out what the right one is for them.

Are there sessions when I can try a variety of sports?

If I don't know what Taekwondo is really like, is there a way for me to try it before I sign up and, you know, pay the fee to join it for the year?

Yeah, there is.

So when our students come for orientation, we will hold a sports fair at St Sport.

And during that sports fair, all the clubs will be present and they'll have a chance to show all the new students who they are and what they do.

And following that, each of those clubs will have a Give it a Go week.

And during that week they'll open their doors and all of the students can come and try as many sports as they like for free during those periods.

And it's a chance to come and try before you buy.

If you like, you might want to try two or three sports before you find out what you like.

And during that time, the gym and the fitness facilities are also free of charge.

Speaking about costs, can you give us an example of how much things might cost?

Because again, like I know it's going to vary, but just as a general example, how much or how little can it cost to do a sport for a year?

Yeah, so every club has their own membership structure because they are all completely unique.

So some clubs will cost more than others.

Typically some of our clubs who are more recreational that don't use as many of our facilities, you could join a club for around about £60 a year.

Although some of our more expensive clubs that have lots of additional costs will be more than that.

But very much on the basis of you pay for the resource that you receive.

But everyone is so different, it's hard to kind of give an idea of each of the individual prices, although you can check out our website and all of the club sport prices will be on our St Sport website.

That's really interesting what you mentioned about recreational.

So recreational is the level where I don't really need to commit myself to, you know, training every day.

Is that the idea?

Yeah, and some of our clubs are more recreational and more competitive than others, netball being a great example.

They do both and so do many of our other sports.

But netball have weekly recreational sessions where you just come along and drop in and play.

It really is the emphasis on participation and fun, whereas within the same club there will be people travelling all over Britain competing for their university.

So even within that one club there are so many different levels.

Football is the same.

We'll have 6-a-side football leagues, Sunday football leagues for beginner level, and equally our women's football team were last year's national British champions.

So again, another example of all levels within one club.

What should I do if I want to make sure that I maybe join the more competitive team?

Is there something I can do ahead of September before I arrive to, you know, check when the tryouts will be?

Because I presume there are tryouts.

Yes, some clubs will have tryouts.

A lot of clubs will have them during orientation week and a lot of them will have them throughout the season.

I suppose the advice I would give would be on our website each of our clubs is student-run, student-led.

They all have their own e-mail address.

What I would say for anyone interested in a particular sport would be reach out to that club via e-mail.

Ask them when they have their tryouts, ask them how they do it so you can get that information ahead of time and before you arrive in St Andrews.

I suppose this would be really useful for students as well who are coming just for one year, exchange students, postgraduate students, if they want to definitely be on the ball, you know, they don't have that much time.

They only have a year.

So they might want to research this ahead of time.

With undergraduate students though, you can move up and down, right?

You can be one year recreational, next year try out for the competitive teams and stuff.

Yeah, that's common, that's very common.

People will come in in their first year and you know, if they're good enough, they might find themselves in the top team.

But it might be a case of building up your experience and confidence and then therefore making those steps.

Some people come and they don't want to though, they just still want to play at that recreational level and that's fantastic too.

But it's all about the individual and what ambition that they have.

Speaking of ambition in performance sport, so we spoke briefly about competitive teams and teams winning things.

So whilst we are extremely proud of our participation, recreational and club sport offering, we also have a performance sport programme that looks at a combination of performance teams within our club sport programme and also talented individuals across any sport.

So currently we have our women's basketballers who have just been promoted to the top National League, absolutely fantastic, really proud of them.

We have women's football who compete routinely at the top level of British sport.

We have a mixed golf team who, I mean St Andrews is the home of golf, our golf team are fantastic.

We have a number of different teams but our competitive performance squad will travel all over Europe representing the university, and again they have won BUCS British Championships many times, so really, really talented programmes.

We also have netball who are a fantastic programme within St Sport.

They compete at the top end of our Scottish sporting system.

Rowing is another one.

We have strong links with British Rowing and we're now developing sort of an Olympic pathway within St Andrews.

There's some really, really exciting things going on there.

Our men's rugby team, again operating at British level, lots of very, very impressive players in there, some of which have played in the Under 20 Six Nations Series over the last year or two.

So our performance programme is something we're extremely proud of, although it is not just the programmes themselves.

We have some very talented individuals who compete within our other clubs, but they are supported athletes and they'll have access to strength and conditioning, physio, academic flexibility, and support and guidance from a number of trained professionals within the department.

Can I ask if you are somebody who maybe would like to be considered for the performance sport spot?

Is this something you should be raising now in spring, you know, summer before you enrol, should you be in touch with the coaches for your team?

Yeah, again, I'm going to signpost people to our website.

There's a Performance Sports section on that and that will provide people with more information about the specific programmes that we've mentioned there and also the scholarship opportunities.

And again, they operate at very different levels.

Some people will receive more support than others based on circumstance, based on their ability.

But yeah, if you go to the Performance Sports section of the website, it will give you all of the information and it will tell you the timelines needed to ask for information or apply to be part of the programme.

I've also heard mentioned that in some cases, students who are in these performance teams might arrive on campus a little early and it's certainly something that we've had asked before.

Would you mind just mentioning, do students maybe sometimes have to arrive ahead of the semester starting?

I suppose each programme is different again, some of our programmes, so men's rugby for example, they have a very early varsity match which is right at the start of semester.

So their men's rugby team will typically come back a bit earlier in order to get some pre-season training done ahead of a very important match against Edinburgh.

So they will tend to come back a bit quicker.

Quite a few of the performance squads will tend to come back a wee bit earlier because the level of sport they're competing at, they need to get themselves ready to hit the ground running when semester starts.

They're all sports specific and dependent on the nature of the season of the sport.

Again, that would be something you could reach out to St Sport and ask, or the sports specific director of sport for those programmes.

And you mentioned that there is a certain level of academic flexibility.

Would you mind just giving some examples of what that looks like?

Yeah.

So obviously the university is about academics first and foremost, and we believe that sport significantly enhances that student experience.

And sometimes there can be a clash.

So our students will quite often have to travel all over Scotland or the UK on Wednesday afternoons and sometimes that means they may have to request to miss a class.

Now we can't guarantee that that request will be granted, but what we do is work with our colleagues in the academic schools to let them know what these programmes are, let them know where their travel is, and verify that it is university sport business.

And where possible, flexibility is given so people can miss classes as long as they catch up on them and they're not missing too much.

Recreational sports, something we've spoken about a little bit, largely in relation to club sport where most of them have recreational offerings.

We are aware that not everyone wants to join a club though, some people like it to be even less formal than that.

And we have opportunities for those people as well.

So we have a colour run every year which is a really cool event that we use to help bring people together but also raise money for our international volunteering programme.

So that is all held on St Sport land.

We go for a run right around the kind of lovely Westfields.

Families come, university staff come, students come, the community comes.

It's just a real feel-good event to bring people together and have some fun with no commitment.

We also run some intramural sports leagues, so netball, football, hockey, they will have competitions where you can just get a group of friends, sign up to the league, and dip in and out as you wish without the commitment required to play club sport.

Because we think sport is different things to different people and everyone has different levels of commitment and motivation.

We have something called Try Sport Tuesday and social sport as well.

So every Tuesday night we have free sport open to anybody, and what typically happens is people come along and it's led by our student interns.

They'll come along and just do various sports.

One night it might be dodgeball, one night it might be trampolining, one night it might be table tennis.

It would be something different every week and it's an opportunity for people to come along and engage in sport for free, no cost, in their own time, with absolutely no commitment whatsoever.

So we love that programme and it is very, very successful and well attended.

One of the things that we talked about right at the start was St Andrews being the home of golf.

So we have a golf lessons programme that we've run in partnership with the St Andrews Links Golf Academy.

So they're PGA qualified instructors and they offer lessons for beginners, for people who have some experience, and people who are a bit more advanced in a group setting.

So when students come here, it's a great opportunity for them to learn golf in the home of golf and with the backdrop of the Old Course behind the driving range.

So definitely something we'd recommend.

We also run tennis lessons, individual and group, and climbing lessons.

We have PT classes as well for people to come and get one-on-one instruction or for people to have group instruction.

So it's not all about club sport.

Club sport is fantastic but with that programme we have a number of different ways that people can be active a bit more recreationally.

So membership of St Sport can be in a number of different ways: people could join a club.

People could join a club and the gym, people could join both, and people could join multiple clubs.

We, as I mentioned earlier, are refurbishing the gym, so we're extremely excited about that.

We have over 40 fitness classes each week with the opportunity for personal training.

Over and above that, our students can come in and book a badminton court.

They could come in and book a tennis court, indoor or outdoor, they could book space to play basketball, they could go and kick a football around.

There's loads of different ways for people just to dip in and out as they wish.

We also have a cafe here called Zone 1 and it's a really good space, not just to get a snack or get a drink, but many of our students will stay here, get their laptops out, they'll study, they'll chat with their friends.

We have meeting rooms upstairs that our clubs will use for committee meetings and just to gather and do some study.

So we have so many different things that the students can benefit from through being part of St Sport.

Excellence, experience, and engagement are three pillars of St Sport and we love the fact that sport plays such a significant part in the student experience.

Like we said earlier, it's where friends are made, it's where skills are built, it's where people look back and remember those great times, and we think sport plays a massive part in that.

So across our clubs, the 53 of them, we have over 630 committee members and each of them play a really vital role in the running, leadership, and development of their club.

And we work closely with those leaders to train them and develop them to make sure they can provide the best possible student experience within their club, so that's what their job is.

And our job is to support them.

The volunteering, we spoke about so many different opportunities.

We have a great initiative here in St Andrews called the Wave Project.

It's a national programme and it ties in with our surf club and it's about surf therapy and using the ocean and surfing to engage with children who may have a few challenges in their life.

There's trained deliverers and our surf club will go along and just have some fun with the kids out in the ocean and it's absolutely fantastic.

And then we have our Zambian programme.

You know, I've been fortunate enough to have been out to Zambia to accompany our students there and it's a wonderful, wonderful experience, a great student experience.

But the programme itself is led by local need.

Everything we do out there is to help sport and help people in country, and in doing so we do provide a fantastic opportunity for our students, so it's something I would highly recommend.

If anyone's interested in it, check out the website again because it really is a fantastic opportunity.

Our staff are here to help, we're here to support, we're here to help students get the best out of their university experience, and that's what we're here to do.

We have a number of staff who are expert in their sport, expert in their field.

But above that, and I think more importantly, there's just some really, really good people that work here, that care about sport and care about the students that we engage with.

So yeah, we really are big on helping and supporting people here at St Sport.

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is our internships and it's a programme that we've developed over the years, so we typically take on around about 10 interns each year.

It's a volunteer development programme which is accompanied by a stipend payment so students can get paid for helping St Sport with their day-to-day work.

So we currently have some photography interns, we have a finance intern, we have volunteer and development interns, and we have interns that help run our student sport and participation programme.

So just a pretty unique way for students to get involved with the runnings of the department and help build their skills and CV as they go.

Thank you so much, Duncan.

That was absolutely fantastic.

I hope everyone has been excited by this.

I think it's such a good idea to get involved in sports, even if you're not sporty, even if you're not looking to, you know, become a muscled person.

Even then it's a great way to meet other people, to try surfing in Scotland.

Who would have thought, you know, tell all your people back home, you come to Scotland, you learn to surf.

I think it's absolutely fantastic.

You probably know there are lots of other videos you can watch that should be on the same page that you're on at the moment.

But we also will have some live events that will be coming up all over the spring and summer.

You can engage with us live at those stages.

So please do scan the QR code on the screen if you would like to participate in any live sessions.

And we do have social media as well, which you can reach us through.

Like mentioned throughout the presentation, sports, the sports teams, the sports coaches, a lot of them will have their own individual profiles on our website and you can reach their social media that way.

So if you would like to get in touch with any specific department, any specific team, please do find their direct contact details on the website.

Thank you again so much for joining us and we hope to see you in September.