The second-to-last Monday in May saw my mother and I taking the shuttle to the airport and gleefully checking our luggage in for our next flight. My dad and brother were arriving that morning from San Fransisco, and by the time we were checked in we were able to meet them at our gate and wait for our flight up to Aberdeen, Scotland, to start the next leg in our European adventure. Predictably, I was very excited to see my dad and brother and we were all thrilled to learn that what my mom thought were allergies turned out to in fact be a cold. (Only one of those statements was sarcastic.) Our flight to Aberdeen was uneventful up until we reached the baggage claim. Remember – back in January – how the Paris airport managed to lose my luggage? Well, at least mine had made it to Paris but it had not managed to find its way to Montpellier until the next day – the luggage that my dad and brother had checked back in Eugene had never even made it out of the San Fransisco airport.
Reunited in Paris!
With reassurance that the Aberdeen airport would call my dad once his luggage arrived, we set out to find a taxi that would be big enough to fit both us and the luggage that we did have. As it turns out, it was a good thing that we were missing two suitcases because we would not have found a cab that would have worked. Our drive from the Aberdeen airport to our hotel in downtown Aberdeen was gorgeous – I had enjoyed watching the countryside from my seat on the airplane, but I loved getting to see the city. Just from driving, Aberdeen had already made its way to my favorite European city solely because of aesthetics. There were no towering apartment complexes packed like sardines like many of the French cities I have visited, and the roads – while still narrow compared to the U.S. – felt wide and roomy compared to the streets of a lot of the other countries I have visited. While all of the houses were different, there was a large sense of unity because they were built out of the same stones. In short, I absolutely loved the feel of the city just from riding around in a car for 20 minutes.
The lobby of the second floor of the MiCasa ApartHotel.
We had a fully functional apartment while we stayed, complete with 2 stories, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, laundry, living room, and full kitchen. It was awesome!
The upstairs bedroom.
Here we learned that back in June of 2010 Scotland had launched their “Zero Waste Plan” and now businesses such as the MiCasa were required to follow these new guidelines. “Zero waste” is exactly what it sounds like, and according to the Scottish government’s website, their goal is to have “70 per cent target recycled, and maximum 5 per cent sent to landfill” by 2025, which includes all waste. This is a vision that “…describes a Scotland where all waste is seen as a resource; Waste is minimised; valuable resources are not disposed of in landfills, and most waste is sorted, leaving only limited amounts to be treated.” I was overjoyed at the news and was super excited to see how it was implemented across Scotland; my dad was not quite as enthusiastic as he now had 4 different trash cans he needed to differentiate between. To help with any possible confusion, each of the 4 bins were color-coded and had a list of items that should be thrown away, such as “food waste”, “paper products”, “plastics”, and “other”.
The next morning my mom and I left the boys to recover from jet lag while we went to the University of Aberdeen to tour their graduate program. Anyone who had spent time talking with me while I was in France knew that I was incredibly excited to learn more about going to graduate school in Scotland, but since I had mostly been waiting to tell people until it was more official meant that if you were not in France with me (or part of my immediate, 4-person family) you were probably unaware of my plans. Through incredible miscommunication, I learned the night before I was supposed to tour the university that the secretary of the graduate department was not near as good as anyone working in an office at MSU, and even though I had a meeting with a professor and had been talking with this lady for almost a month, I did not actually have a tour of the graduate program. That was ok, though, because the office gave me so much information to read through, plus lots of information for self-guided tours. And, I still had the meeting with the professor to look forward to.
Before I describe the University of Aberdeen’s campus, or King’s College as it is also called, let me reiterate my feelings on the city of Aberdeen:
It. Is. Awesome.
Now let me add my thoughts from walking through campus:
It is also awesome.
And after my meeting with the professor:
The professors are more awesome.
And finally, the graduate programs I was interested in:
Incredibly exciting, innovative, and – you guessed it! – even more awesome.
The buildings on campus were absolutely gorgeous!
Even though the campus was at the heart of Aberdeen, it didn’t feel like it was in the city.
The University of Aberdeen was founded in 1495 and both undergraduate and postgraduate students who are, according to their website, “taught by academic staff who are active in research, many involved in international collaborations at the forefront of discovery in their respective discipline, focused on finding answers to the issues facing our society and economy today.” It is the top research performance university in Scotland (which is “based on the proportion of research appearing in the top 10% of international journals”), and Scotland’s 3rd oldest university.
Since I did not have a tour, many of the facts I learned from material I had been given or from online. Some of the more interesting facts relative to my major and my decision to tour the University of Aberdeen are:
– It is a university that is consistently ranked in the top 1% of the world’s universities,
– It is “Rated top in the UK in REF14 for environmental and soil science research,”
– It is “named as Scotland’s safest university city (Complete University Guide),”
– And, it is a “Community of 120 nationalities, with 16,500 students: 49% men 51% women, and 12% mature undergraduates.”
While at the university I was looking into the Ecology & Environmental Sustainability postgraduate program. To give me more information about the program and see if I would be a good fit, I got to meet with Professor Justin Travis of the Zoology department. This meeting took up most of the time we had at the University of Aberdeen, and I learned a lot. The graduate program is an intense, 12-month program where you earn an insane amount of credits. Professor Travis told me that all the related programs in the environmental graduate degrees often share some classes, which promotes a community of people who already know how to work together with other disciplines before they graduate. The University of Aberdeen is situated near 5 different ecosystems and is doing its part to lessen their environmental impact (see photo below). In short, the university seemed absolutely perfect to me.
Stickers on the mirrors in the bathroom reminding you to not waste water!
Since I still have two years left of my undergraduate degrees, I still have about two years before I was recommended to apply for a postgraduate position at the University of Aberdeen. While I am looking forward to this whole process and entirely new stress level, not having to apply for graduate school next spring will give me a lot more time to recover financially from my study abroad and to create an exceptional application. Or so the plan is.
After my school-touring excitement, my mom and I met up with the rest of our family and we walked down to the docks to visit the maritime museum. With free entrance and 4 stories, the maritime museum was definitely worth our time. There was so much going on in the museum, and while everything went together, each floor had its own theme.
View of one of the ports.
The center of the museum was taken up by a scale model of the Murchison Platform, which was very cool to see since it stretched from the top floor all the way down to the entrance. The platform is a total height of 254 meters – 156 of which are in the water – and it drills to depths of 3,275 meters. From what we learned, Scotland (if not the UK as a whole) is making a large effort to move away from oil dependency. The Murchison Platform is in the process of decommissioning, and while that can take up to 10 years to be completed, their oil production is on a steady decline.
The top of the Murchison Platform.
Far below, the lobby can be seen!
As cool as that was, my favorite part about the museum was learning about Scotland’s (and the UK’s for some parts) commitment to green energy. As I learned in the museum, “The UK is the world leader in offshore wind energy generation, with as many offshore wind turbine generators already installed as the rest of the world put together.” Simply put, that number is 568 wind turbines already installed with another 665 in construction. The UK is also researching renewable energy in the form of wave power machines and tidal turbines, which both harness the kinetic energy of the sea. I am very excited to see how these two forms of energy are developed in the near future – while wave energy mostly relies on strong winds, the tides are influenced by the gravitational pulls of the moon and sun and therefore never stop.
Trying my hand at driving the remotely operated underwater vehicle!
My brother giving it a go.
The museum also had a lot of history of ships used in this area, complete with a model controls.
After only 24 hours in Scotland I had pretty much decided that it was by far the coolest country I had visited during my study abroad and that I was absolutely in love with it!
Haste ye back!
Wander Onwards 
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