What do Postgraduates even do in their spare time?

The position of the postgraduate in St Andrews is a difficult one. Boasting table-leading departments in International Relations and Divinity, it’s not surprising that the university has attracted about 2500 postgraduates. Yet I should never want to be one. The fundamental issue with coming to and experiencing St Andrews as a postgrad is that you will quite quickly find yourself wishing that you had spent your entire undergraduate experience here instead. St Andrews is a town that, like the women who inhabit it, rewards commitment, and postgraduates face the challenge of compressing four years of the St Andrean experience into one or two.

Another social phenomenon I’ve noticed in St Andrews is the art of the magazine. Apart from our precious Saint, the university boasts an ecosystem of written material: The Stand, the St Andrews Economist, Hearing Aid, and now SAFAR Magazine. Co-founded by PhD student Marina Haq and her mother, it focuses on ‘Where East meets West’. Unlike many student-run magazines which release one issue and fizzle out once their founder has realised they now have enough content to put it on their LinkedIn, SAFAR has been reliably releasing content for over one year.

This combination of social phenomena led to an eclectic evening at SPACE Café on Wednesday the 20^th April. Advertised as an invite-only dinner for The SAFAR Society, I nonetheless found myself the only undergrad among a sea of postgrads, some eager to convert me to Catholicism, others eager to mention how much they’d rather be ‘shooting down south’ than here.

Marina had asked each guest beforehand about their interests so she could fashion the seating plan — an effort to engineer connection before anyone had sat down. We were also issued with ‘SAFAR passports’ and slips of paper printed with prompts to get the conversational blood moving. Very LinkedIn. Within minutes, however, I had concluded that I had somehow wandered into an established friend group rather than your average event.

With a bit of detective work, I had realised what had happened. Postgraduates who had just moved to St Andrews, far too inexperienced to brave the St Andrews rental market, had all moved into SPACE apartments. The vast majority of people were from, and knew each other by, SPACE. With not enough room to host their own dinner parties, they had simply booked SPACE café instead. It was effectively a rather engineered flatmates dinner, just with no alcohol.

I left SPACE that evening with a full stomach and quickly melded back into the undergraduate fold. Although the people were engaging, intelligent, and pleasant, I had the overriding feeling that I had wandered into someone else’s occasion. But as the sole undergraduate in a room that was, when you stripped back the passports and prompt cards, essentially a SPACE residents’ dinner with better branding, I'm not sure I was ever quite the target audience. Although SAFAR Magazine’s mission is laudable and sits in the upper quartile of effort in the St Andrews magazine ecosphere, my overwhelming emotion was one of confusion as to why I was even there.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons