I've always heard it's best to begin at the beginning.

We're living in a world with a generally short attention-span, so I'll give the Reader's Digest version first: My name is Lauren, I'm 23 years old, I was accepted into graduate school today, and I will be using this blog to chronicle my impending move from Durham, North Carolina, USA, to Edinburgh, Scotland, and my life as a grad student and an expat thereafter.

To give the context for all this, I have to turn the clock back about two years.  I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May of 2009 with a BA in psychology and a minor in music.  Nine days after graduation, I boarded a plane bound for Dublin, Ireland and spent the next three months backpacking through Europe with various companions, including my best friend, my favorite cousin, my cousin's cousin, and for nine memorable days, a motley assortment of other 20-something backpackers.  It was an incredible trip.

The highlight of that trip, thanks in no small part to the lovely and amazing people at Wild in Scotland, was the two weeks I spent in Scotland.  I do not possess the vocabulary to describe how beautiful that country is, and won't attempt to do so just now.  All I will say is that I missed it badly enough when I was gone to make two return trips: one in April 2010, and one this past January.  My plan is to post stories and photos from all three of these trips intermittently over the coming months, but for now, on with the narrative!

Relocating to the UK has crossed my mind multiple times, and I investigated all the visa options I could find, only to discover that basically none of them are available to Americans.  The Youth Mobility Scheme?  Not available to Americans.  An ancestry visa (my paternal grandmother was born in England, so I'd theoretically be eligible for this)?  Not available to Americans.  An internship with BUNAC?  I was already too long out of school for that.  From what I could see, the only open avenue would be WWOOFing, which is technically volunteer work and therefore allowable on a tourist visa, but I have zero experience working on farms, and no idea of whether I'd turn out to have any aptitude for it if I tried.  And the tourist visa would run out in six months, anyway.

Cut to late January, 2011.  It was my final day in Edinburgh before I would be returning home via London.  Feeling peckish, I popped into a coffee shop on the Royal Mile.  The guy behind the counter had an American accent, so I eagerly asked him how he'd managed to get a work visa.  He responded that he was living in the UK on a student visa, which permitted him to work for 20 hours per week.

I had looked at going to school in the UK before this, but all the programs I found were either beyond my qualifications to get into, or of no interest to me.  So it was almost on a whim that I logged onto the University of Edinburgh's website in the first week of February, when I was freshly back in the US and pining heavily for Scotland, to look at psychology programs.  Lo and behold, what should I find but a year-long MSc program in performance psychology, beginning in September 2011, for which I was qualified and to which applications were still open.

At this point, it would be helpful for me to state that I am a musician.  I've been playing the piano since I was six and the oboe since I was thirteen, and now play the oboe professionally.  So a program in performance psychology seemed like it would be a natural fit for me.  My understanding is that I will be somewhat of an anomaly in the field, since most of the existing research is in athletics and I want to study the performing arts, but as an oboe-playing colleague of mine said to me earlier today, "Tennis and music, same thing!"

So I applied.  Filled out the application, wrote an essay, got a former professor and a former employer to write reference letters, wham bam thank you ma'am, done.  The final piece of my application was submitted on May 12, and today I got my offer of admission.

And now the feverish planning for the move can commence!  Classes start September 19, and my tentative plan at the moment is to fly to Edinburgh sometime in the second half of August.  All the things which need to be done between now and then have been flying through my head all day, but mostly I've just been savoring the feeling of having gotten into grad school, and being about to move to a place I love.  I'll be documenting the process as it unfolds here, so stay tuned!

In conclusion, here is a photo of me: