Like the town, the school of Heriot-Watt was a very small, with only about 600 students.  This was a perfect setting for a new student from a foreign country, because it was easy to meet people and to navigate around the campus.  The building where most of the design students were located was the High Mill, which was once a functioning textile mill, now converted into studios and workshops for the school. 

Each discipline of print, knit, and weave had their own studio space, and I was with the printers.  Everyone got their own desk, where you could work on your preliminary ideas, meet with your professors, and also catch up on the latest gossip about British celebrities.  Once you had your final design ideas, you could take them upstairs to the CAD lab to have them digitally printed, or go downstairs to the print room where you could make your own screens and hand print with dyes and pigments onto fabric.  For the main project of the term, I focused mostly on screen printing, because I had never done it before, and I wanted to try something new.

While my time spent in Scotland was way too short, I still managed to broaden my ideas about textiles, and also about the world itself.  I learned a lot from this experience, made some lifelong friends, and got to travel around a country that I had never been to before.  I am so glad I had an opportunity like this, and I would do it all over again in a heartbeat.