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Hey question for any current students here ?

Do Halls (if so which?) at St. Andrews do regular formal hall dinners like Bristol /Durham/ oxbridge, it seems like a very St. Andrewsy thing but i havent found a mention of it anywhere.

Would really appreciate more info ?
St Salvators Quad, University of St Andrews
University of St Andrews
Original post by Orinincandenza
Hey question for any current students here ?

Do Halls (if so which?) at St. Andrews do regular formal hall dinners like Bristol /Durham/ oxbridge, it seems like a very St. Andrewsy thing but i havent found a mention of it anywhere.

Would really appreciate more info ?


Yes, every hall has formal dinners - I think Sallies has one every week. Anyway they happen all the time, personally I think the whole thing is done to death here, but people do seem to have a good time at them. Everyone wears their red robe, and it all feels very 'St Andrewsy'.
Original post by medicinemm
Yes, every hall has formal dinners - I think Sallies has one every week. Anyway they happen all the time, personally I think the whole thing is done to death here, but people do seem to have a good time at them. Everyone wears their red robe, and it all feels very 'St Andrewsy'.


No, not every hall has formal dinners. McIntosh doesn't.
Reply 7583
Original post by Orinincandenza
Hey question for any current students here ?

Do Halls (if so which?) at St. Andrews do regular formal hall dinners like Bristol /Durham/ oxbridge, it seems like a very St. Andrewsy thing but i havent found a mention of it anywhere.

Would really appreciate more info ?



Original post by medicinemm
Yes, every hall has formal dinners - I think Sallies has one every week. Anyway they happen all the time, personally I think the whole thing is done to death here, but people do seem to have a good time at them. Everyone wears their red robe, and it all feels very 'St Andrewsy'.



Original post by Meteorshower
No, not every hall has formal dinners. McIntosh doesn't.


David Russell Apartments don't either. But we're mixed with catered and self-catered so can't really be whole hall. And there's probably too many of us too. :wink:
Original post by medicinemm
Yes, every hall has formal dinners - I think Sallies has one every week. Anyway they happen all the time, personally I think the whole thing is done to death here, but people do seem to have a good time at them. Everyone wears their red robe, and it all feels very 'St Andrewsy'.



Original post by Meteorshower
No, not every hall has formal dinners. McIntosh doesn't.



Original post by Helsy
David Russell Apartments don't either. But we're mixed with catered and self-catered so can't really be whole hall. And there's probably too many of us too. :wink:


So i guess all of the old ones or all of the fully catered ones do it ?
Original post by Orinincandenza
So i guess all of the old ones or all of the fully catered ones do it ?


Tbh the only hall i've heard of that does it is Sallies. McIntosh is fully catered.

All the returners did at one point pretend their were formal dinners, all going down at in black dress one friday evening and chastising freshers for not knowing about the "long held" tradition. That's as close as we've come to formal dinners :tongue:
Original post by Meteorshower
Tbh the only hall i've heard of that does it is Sallies. McIntosh is fully catered.

All the returners did at one point pretend their were formal dinners, all going down at in black dress one friday evening and chastising freshers for not knowing about the "long held" tradition. That's as close as we've come to formal dinners :tongue:


Oh right, yeah i havent seen much about it but was curious, is Mcintosh nice ?
Original post by Orinincandenza
Oh right, yeah i havent seen much about it but was curious, is Mcintosh nice ?


McIntosh is the best! I literally don't know anyone here who wanted catered that would rather be somewhere else.
Original post by Meteorshower
McIntosh is the best! I literally don't know anyone here who wanted catered that would rather be somewhere else.


huh right, was also thinking about Regs or Andrew Melville, any thoughts ?
Original post by Orinincandenza
huh right, was also thinking about Regs or Andrew Melville, any thoughts ?


Not lived there, can't help you much with them. Don't know anyone that has strong negative opinions about either though, other than they're not the /most/ central.
Hey,
I tried to read back as far as I can, to avoid asking further questions.. But still got so many!
I'm going to be applying to St Andrews for Literature,
My predicted grades are AAB, and I need AAA.. what to do about that? will i get an outright rejection?

Okay, now main questions
1) I've been reading its very expensive to live in St Andrews.. I thought it was one of the cheaper places in the UK.. am I wrong?
2) What would be the cheapest way of getting from Birmingham to St Andrews..and how long would it take?
3) The lease on rooms are around 32 weeks right, so I would constantly have to travel back and forth from Brum to St Andrews.. will this cost a lot?
4) Why do you have room checks, and why do they confiscate things, what kind of things are not allowed?

Thats all for now, thankyou so much and sorry for long message!!x
Reply 7591
Original post by Coolkat
Hey,
I tried to read back as far as I can, to avoid asking further questions.. But still got so many!
I'm going to be applying to St Andrews for Literature,
My predicted grades are AAB, and I need AAA.. what to do about that? will i get an outright rejection?

Okay, now main questions
1) I've been reading its very expensive to live in St Andrews.. I thought it was one of the cheaper places in the UK.. am I wrong?
2) What would be the cheapest way of getting from Birmingham to St Andrews..and how long would it take?
3) The lease on rooms are around 32 weeks right, so I would constantly have to travel back and forth from Brum to St Andrews.. will this cost a lot?
4) Why do you have room checks, and why do they confiscate things, what kind of things are not allowed?

Thats all for now, thankyou so much and sorry for long message!!x


Sorry, I don't know anything about Literature, so I'll leave that for one of the others.
But the other questions I can answer. :smile:
1) Sorry, but St Andrews is quite an expensive place to live. It's also a great place to live, and you can see that if you come to an open day/have been to one. But if you budget, then St Andrews turns out not too be too expensive. I manage fine. :smile:
2) My guess is that the cheapest would be train (you can get direct from Birmingham New Street to Edinburgh and from there a train to Leuchars). From what I can see it would be around the £40 if you have a Young Person's Railcard. Maybe less if you get in early on the advance tickets and chose awkward times to travel.
3) The only times you will most likely "need" to go home is during Christmas and the January inter-semester period. Your room contract doesn't cover that 1 month. But apart from that the period covered on your contract takes you from the very beginning of Freshers' week to the very end of the May exam period. So hopefully you won't have to keep travelling forwards and backwards from home (unless you want to go home for a weekend etc).
4) Yes, there are room checks. And it feels like they vary between halls, but typically if you're self-catered then it'll be something like a monthly check to see that you're cleaning your room and flat/house. They also keep an eye out for things you not allowed, e.g. candles, dangly lights etc. Details of what you're not allowed can be read in the Terms & Conditions (they're sort of dotted about everywhere...).
What you might be thinking about with confiscation is previous discussions about people's laptops and other things being taken. This happens during routine PAT Testing (where they make sure your electrical equipment is electrically safe) and in some very rare cases, things like laptops have had to be confiscated because they failed the testing. But that's it really.

I hope this helps, I know I can ramble on a bit. :wink:
Original post by Helsy
Sorry, I don't know anything about Literature, so I'll leave that for one of the others.
But the other questions I can answer. :smile:
1) Sorry, but St Andrews is quite an expensive place to live. It's also a great place to live, and you can see that if you come to an open day/have been to one. But if you budget, then St Andrews turns out not too be too expensive. I manage fine. :smile:
2) My guess is that the cheapest would be train (you can get direct from Birmingham New Street to Edinburgh and from there a train to Leuchars). From what I can see it would be around the £40 if you have a Young Person's Railcard. Maybe less if you get in early on the advance tickets and chose awkward times to travel.
3) The only times you will most likely "need" to go home is during Christmas and the January inter-semester period. Your room contract doesn't cover that 1 month. But apart from that the period covered on your contract takes you from the very beginning of Freshers' week to the very end of the May exam period. So hopefully you won't have to keep travelling forwards and backwards from home (unless you want to go home for a weekend etc).
4) Yes, there are room checks. And it feels like they vary between halls, but typically if you're self-catered then it'll be something like a monthly check to see that you're cleaning your room and flat/house. They also keep an eye out for things you not allowed, e.g. candles, dangly lights etc. Details of what you're not allowed can be read in the Terms & Conditions (they're sort of dotted about everywhere...).
What you might be thinking about with confiscation is previous discussions about people's laptops and other things being taken. This happens during routine PAT Testing (where they make sure your electrical equipment is electrically safe) and in some very rare cases, things like laptops have had to be confiscated because they failed the testing. But that's it really.

I hope this helps, I know I can ramble on a bit. :wink:


Thankyou so much! You've cleared a few things up!
40 quid really? wow, I checked it out and it was so much more than that.. maybe its cos of the railcard
Reply 7593
Original post by Coolkat
Thankyou so much! You've cleared a few things up!
40 quid really? wow, I checked it out and it was so much more than that.. maybe its cos of the railcard


Rail card gets you a 20% discount. So even though you pay a bit for one, you'll make it back quickly. :smile: But yeah, good idea to book train tickets as early as possible simply to take advantage of the advance ticket prices.
Reply 7594
I have been looking at this year's semester dates just to get an idea, and it seems that you are on holiday a lot of the time as a St Andrews student. Summer vacation from sometime in May (when do people usually finish their exams in May? late May or something?) until mid-September, Christmas vacation for more than a month, followed up with a spring vacation for two weeks in March... I assume that this is normal for a British university, but from a Norwegian perspective this seems quite weird (but also very pleasant, of course).

But my question is, when you are on holiday, are you actually on holiday? Or do you usually do some studying as well? Also, when you are not on holiday, how many hours do you usually study each day? I do know that this questions differs from course to course, and even person to person, but still... with so many weeks on holiday, I imagine people would have to study quite a lot during the teaching and revision periods.
Reply 7595
Does anyone know how to use torrents in eduroam or resnet?
Reply 7596
Original post by VildeRH
I have been looking at this year's semester dates just to get an idea, and it seems that you are on holiday a lot of the time as a St Andrews student. Summer vacation from sometime in May (when do people usually finish their exams in May? late May or something?) until mid-September, Christmas vacation for more than a month, followed up with a spring vacation for two weeks in March... I assume that this is normal for a British university, but from a Norwegian perspective this seems quite weird (but also very pleasant, of course).

But my question is, when you are on holiday, are you actually on holiday? Or do you usually do some studying as well? Also, when you are not on holiday, how many hours do you usually study each day? I do know that this questions differs from course to course, and even person to person, but still... with so many weeks on holiday, I imagine people would have to study quite a lot during the teaching and revision periods.


Firstly, we get roughly the same amount of holiday as many of the other British universities do. It's just that we all time it a bit differently. St Andrews is odd in the fact that we start so early on in September. But it does mean we get summer starting in June. :smile:

And the amount of work done during the holidays really depends on what type of person you are and what course you're doing. Obviously the summer doesn't really have any work in it, unless you choose to take up an internship or something. And Christmas, it might be handy to read over the books for the next semester, but again, there ought not to be any official work. Not for the sciences anyway. But the Easter holiday will need you to do some work, be it revision, tutorials, essays whatever... there'll be something to do.

And because you mention revision, we get 1 week at the end of the teaching weeks to revise before the exam period starts and no teaching will happen that week.

I hope that helps. (And if I'm wrong about anything, I hope one of the others will pick up on it!)



Original post by nad4321
Does anyone know how to use torrents in eduroam or resnet?


I managed to do some last year, but I had to leave the torrent on for days for one thing to even find enough bandwidth to do something. But this year I've not managed anything. I think it depends a bit on where you're trying to do it. If you want to torrent, you could always try using Starbucks' internet, or Beanscenes'. But I haven't tried it, so sorry if it doesn't work.
Original post by Orinincandenza
huh right, was also thinking about Regs or Andrew Melville, any thoughts ?


im in melville this year, and i love it!

it's a very sociable hall, i think just in the way it's laid out - if you want to hang out in a large group, you go into a common room or hang out in the corridor rather than in the rooms or in individual kitchens.

i wanted catered and i wouldn't dream of being in a different hall.

what are you applying for? it's location means it's more attractive to science/med students as it's in north haugh, but that being said, going into town doesn't take all that long, and there are very pretty views on the way.

the rooms are relatively big compared to other university halls of residence, with loads of storage, and depending on which side you're allocated, you could have a lovely view across the pond.

melville is the only hall (i think) that you can apply to specifically, and it has a lower price than the other catered halls. :smile:
Original post by laurie:)
im in melville this year, and i love it!

it's a very sociable hall, i think just in the way it's laid out - if you want to hang out in a large group, you go into a common room or hang out in the corridor rather than in the rooms or in individual kitchens.

i wanted catered and i wouldn't dream of being in a different hall.

what are you applying for? it's location means it's more attractive to science/med students as it's in north haugh, but that being said, going into town doesn't take all that long, and there are very pretty views on the way.

the rooms are relatively big compared to other university halls of residence, with loads of storage, and depending on which side you're allocated, you could have a lovely view across the pond.

melville is the only hall (i think) that you can apply to specifically, and it has a lower price than the other catered halls. :smile:


Oh OK, thanks, sounds v. good.

I'm applying for medicine,so would be be closer i guess, but wouldn't mind living in the town, but also it's medicine so probs won't even get in...

Thanks.
Original post by Orinincandenza
Oh OK, thanks, sounds v. good.

I'm applying for medicine,so would be be closer i guess, but wouldn't mind living in the town, but also it's medicine so probs won't even get in...

Thanks.


:h:

yay another medic :biggrin: melville is quite popular for medics - there are loads this year, and it only takes 3-5 minutes to walk to the med school, which is awesome for 9am lectures or if you need to nip back for something quickly.

it's not over till they say it is :smile:

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