Burns Night at the University of St Andrews

Not too long ago I found myself back in a familiar spell circle: Burns Night with St Andrews alumni—old friends, new faces, the comforting hum of shared memory. There was haggis (of course), and an MC who ceremonially read Robert Burn’s Ode to a Haggis while the bagpipes cut through the room like a summons to rebellion.

St Andrews has always felt a little like Hogwarts to me. Students still wear gowns, and as Scotland’s oldest university the magic that lives there is ancient.

I studied physics there as an undergraduate and PhD candidate. Long nights wrestling with equations, chasing symmetries that promised order beneath chaos. Physics is unsentimental in the best way—nature does not care what you believe, only what you can prove. But it also trains a particular kind of wonder: that the universe can be governed by laws elegant enough to write down, yet strange enough to keep you awake at night.

Burns Night reminds me that poetry and science are not opposites — they’re collaborators.

Burns’ Ode to a Haggis is playful on the surface, but beneath it is something defiant: a celebration of the honest, standing unashamed before privilege. It’s a poem that laughs at false grandeur and insists that what sustains life deserves reverence.

If Hogwarts teaches magic, St Andrews teaches responsibility.

And Burns, raising a glass across the centuries, reminds us why it still matters.

Additional Sources:

1. Robert Burns | The Poetry Foundation

2. Burns Night Traditions and Robert Burns Information | Scotland.org

3. Robert Burns and Burns Night | BBC