Modelos explicativos del síndrome de Burnout

When you go to buy a train ticket to St Andrews, at first you will search and search and think this place must not exist, as there is no station for St Andrews. Instead, you are told to get off at a little two-platform station called Leuchars in the middle of a cornfield. While you stare out over the golden fields and watch the occasional car zip past on the road and the multiple jets take off from the nearby RAF base, you wait for a bus and wonder if buses really do arrive here. You will repeat this question to yourself later when you wait for a train back to whatever civilization you came from.

A bus does come, much later than the posted schedule says, and your fifteen minute ride to St Andrews begins with a meander through Guardbridge, which is a street, a roundabout and a paper factory with a tall smokestack you can see from miles away, from both the rail station and the beach in St Andrews. Then left, and unless you have the misfortune to be on the bus to Strathkinness and David Russell Hall, your course more or less follows the beach and the line of water and golf courses into St Andrews. Like the Guardbridge smoke stack, you will see the outline of St Andrews from miles away, and this view is one of the most evocative of St Andrews. From here, you will see the Old Course Hotel and the Royal and Ancient Gold Club. A reddish brick building on a hill and just behind, a dark clock tower with a gleaming brass clock.

She doesn’t remember this about her first visit to St Andrews though. What she remembers is the fields surrounding the train station, and the Sunoco gas station where she called her mother, and the cathedral ruins, which will always remind her of dinosaur skeletons. One photo taken from St Rule’s tower shows a boat perched in the mud. She eats soup and two coffees for dinner, because she was only just catching on that there are no free refills in Britain.

It was back at the railway station, in the extreme gold of the evening sun and the fields that she had a profound feeling of beautiful loneliness, the sensation that this could

be a place the world might easily forget. The train might never actually come, and she might sit on this platform, unnoticed, for years.

She’s stopped feeling this about Leuchars for the most part, because she knows that the trains do indeed arrive and depart, just like at other train stations all over the country. But occasionally the wind blows some feeling of absence through, and she can’t help but feel that she’s waiting for a train in a ghost town.

Not that St Andrews is a ghost town, other than a few weeks in January and April during the University holidays, when most of the students have fled and the weather is still not inviting enough to bring in golfers and tourists. Commercially, it is flooded with charity shops, coffee shops, pricey restaurants (everything from American to Thai to tapas), and several not-too-tacky souvenir shops. And of course, many places to hire a kilt.

Since St Andrews is an old, old city, the stone buildings are turning blackish green after years of being weathered by salt gusts from the North Sea. The brightest colors are the flowers and the boats down in the harbor. Because of this, residents learn to pay attention to the subtle colors—the changing colors of the farmland crops for example, or the shades of the sea, from slate-grey to blue grey to green.

It is all about contrast here—the gold wheat field juxtaposed against a patch of green grass against a sometimes-blue sky. A grey sea, a brown strip of beach, and the delicate skeletons of the dark grey cathedral.

Students take planes, trains, their parents’ lovingly packed cars up to St Andrews at the end of September, and after their exams in May they haul their used clothes to the charity shops. From one end of the academic year to the other, from pier just beyond North Street to the bottom of Lamond Drive, an echo follows, and that echo is the sound of American students trying to figure out Scotland.

Other UK universities may have more American students and study abroad students per capita than the University of St Andrews, but in this tiny Fife university town

with three streets and 7,000 students, they seem to be everywhere.

While Prince William gets blamed for the influx of American girls arriving each year, royalty alone did not make this happen. St Andrews has working relationships with a number of universities who want to send their students over for a Junior Semester Abroad or Junior Year Abroad (JSA/JYA). One of these universities is Elon University in North Carolina. The students pay Elon, who then pays St Andrews for the tuition. The students pay a housing supplement as well. Most undergraduates opt for a fully-catered residence, like the ship-shaped Andrew Melville Hall. The food is not exquisite but being fed is one less thing for them to think of taking care of on their own.