On Moving to Scotland (How and Why I Moved Halfway Around the World): Part One

Throughout high school, I was obsessed with finding a way to live abroad. I trawled the Workaway website, tried to talk my family into initiating a house swap (à la The Holiday), watched British television obsessively, briefly tried to learn French.

It wasn’t that I ever disliked my hometown. Quite the opposite, actually: I was proud to have lived all my life in the city where my father also grew up. But there was something romantic about moving abroad—and actually living there, as an expat, not a tourist—that made me desperate. I wanted to see new things and experience life in someone else’s shoes. I wanted to have an adventure all my own and come back a different person.

My first Christmas in Scotland, December 2017

When the opportunity presented itself to me, it was in the form of Torchbearers International, a Christian ministry that operates centres in twenty countries around the world, including a Bible school at Capernwray Hall, a converted manor home just south of the Lake District in England. I took one look at the website and fell in love. For so many reasons, it seemed like the perfect fit, a chance to gain a deeper understanding of the religion I was taught as a child and work out what I believed for myself, and to do that overlooking rolling green hills across the ocean.  

I applied and was beside myself when an acceptance letter came in the mail, bearing a blue airmail sticker. My family made a holiday of dropping me off, touring the UK for two weeks. It was the first time any of us had been to Britain, or anywhere in Europe for that matter. I knew I would miss my family, but it wasn’t hard to say goodbye because I was so excited to settle in.

There is so much I could say about my time at Capernwray and how it shaped me that it is best left for another blog post. Along with the school and the friends I made there, with every day I fell deeper in love with the country.

I had planned to go home after Capernwray to work and attend college in the autumn, but by the time Christmas rolled around and my peers were sending in their applications, I was unconvinced by my choices.

The problem was that I knew exactly what I wanted: an academically challenging university with a rich history and a strong English course, but with a better work life balance than I anticipated I would find at an Ivy League college—as if I expected to get in. I knew people who had been preparing their applications since kindergarten, practically, and although I was always a good student, I didn’t have the long list of carefully calculated extracurriculars and volunteer hours I knew I would be expected to have. I wanted to learn and succeed, but I also wanted to have a social life and get involved in extracurricular activities and still have time to sleep.

Some of the colleges I had visited were disappointing in other ways: one alumna on a panel in New York said her greatest accomplishment since leaving university was dog-sitting for a B-list celebrity. She was serious.

I knew what I wanted, but I came to the conclusion that it didn’t exist, and as a result I was apathetic about my applications. Anyways, the truth was, after living in a mansion in the English countryside with 150 young people from around the world who had become my constant companions and close friends, anywhere would have felt anticlimactic.

That is, until I learned about St Andrews. Instead of going home that Christmas, I found myself accompanying a new friend to stay with a friend of hers in Scotland over the break (this would turn out to be a dangerous choice: I made lovely new Scottish friends and discovered that I loved Scotland even more than England). We got to talking about college and I explained my dilemma. To my surprise, my new friends asked if I had ever considered applying for university outside the US. No, I said, I hadn’t. It sounds strange, but I hadn’t even considered that was something I could do.

Boxing Day, 26 December 2017, at Whitelee Windfarm

After Christmas, I travelled to Northern Ireland to stay with another group of friends for New Year’s Eve and again found myself explaining what I was looking for in a university. I wondered aloud whether I would be able to find something like that in the UK.

“It sounds like you’re looking for St Andrews,” Rachel told me. She had recently been accepted and knew all about it, even introduced me to a man from her church who had studied there when he was younger.

She was right. The more I heard about St Andrews, and read about it online, the more it seemed exactly what I was looking for.

Later, I posted a picture taken at Stirling Castle, captioned, “Yeah, I could live in Scotland.” Mark, one of the friends I had made in Scotland, wrote back, “Uni?”