Imagine a medieval castle. It sits on a volcanic plug, the Castle Rock, that lies among a multitude of vistas—steep cobblestone streets in the center, a hill to the East, and a wide open sea underneath the hill. Imagine a Gothic monument facing timber-spired buildings on the cobblestone streets and a classical-style palace at the low end of a gently sloping street that runs to the castle. Add to your picture a little bit of rain and fog. The cloudy skies brace cozy little coffee shops, secondhand bookstores, museums, and art galleries. Summertime and Christmas bring in tourists from all over the world.
It’s the fall of 2023, and I’m in Edinburgh, Scotland. I’m walking into the Old College quadrangle at the University of Edinburgh for the first time, not knowing what the following three months will bring, but my heart is, nonetheless, full of excitement. It’s unlike the sugar rush euphoria during a night out when the strobe lights take my feet away, although I will experience that soon. It’s the excitement to live, to hold onto every big and small thing that these three months have to offer.
I held onto everything, although it would be a stretch to say every day of my study abroad experience was a dream. Edinburgh is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and budgeting was very difficult to master (I failed several times, and am still failing). The rain wasn’t always fun, and it certainly made things worse on those days when I had FOMO scrolling Instagram pictures of my DePauw friends. But, as in the beautiful words of an Instagram account that I came across, “it’s about walking around art museums alone; it’s about second-hand bookshops so small you can barely move; it’s about cups of hot coffee when there’s a storm outside.” It’s very easy to romanticize life in Edinburgh, even when you are a broke college student who only has three months there and is trying to experience everything. Almost all of the museums and galleries in the city are free, student deals are everywhere, and public transportation is free with the Young Scot card.
You probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned my studies in the actual study abroad program. It’s because I didn’t study. Just kidding, I did. I took Literary Studies, Marketing, and Animation Studies at the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, all of which were very different from DePauw classes. They were held in lecture halls with 50 or even more students—no attendance taken, no one cares if you haven’t shown up to lectures for weeks or never do the readings. There were small group tutorials too, but I’ll be totally honest and say I skipped some of those without receiving any emails. I had a lot more time to fall in love with my new life, and that’s really the key. Similar to when you first came to DePauw, or started anew with anything, please keep reminding yourself that you have time. It’s tempting to rush it, especially if you only have a few months abroad, but the capitalist mentality of “getting ahead” needs to be left behind. I still got stuff done in Scotland—such as getting As for my papers and landing my summer internship—while wandering aimlessly among the sights for at least a few hours every day. I was lucky to have a fairly easy academic schedule compared to my usual DePauw schedule, which allowed me to slow down and, counterintuitively, achieve my goals. That is my next advice to you: if you can, build an easy schedule. And talk to your advisor before you start planning your study abroad trip. My advisor suggested Edinburgh when I was considering a million different places, for which I will forever be grateful to him.
It will be very funny if I say studying abroad changed me, especially because I’m already studying abroad in the States. But I’ll say that studying abroad in Edinburgh changed me anyway. I found myself in poems printed on the steps leading to the Writers’ Museum, seagulls flying from Portobello Beach to the city, Arthur’s Seat making a gorgeous background for millions of years of history, even in random photos taken with drunken strangers at midnights. I found so much time—I had so much time. It was an experience that I will forever hold dear to my heart, a testament to all the love that I have within myself, sometimes forgotten, but always waiting to blossom.