Education Abroad Student Blog

So now I've been here in frog kingdom for just under 2 months and everything feels like it's running at one hundred miles an hour! In short, I'm still having a ball and loving every minute - even the ever so challenging moments where I find myself sitting helplessly in the lecture seats of what seems to be a never-ending lecture theatre packed with Frenchies left, right and centre, scratching my head as to what 'le fruage' could possibly mean. Eventually, however, I bring myself together and work up the courage to turn to the gorgeous French boy next to me and politely ask if he could please re-explain what the lecturer just said. Then success, finally.

I have been doing a significant amount of travelling around this beautiful continent. I spent last weekend in the Loire Valley, which is over in the west of France. It is renowned for its spectacular array of ancient chateaus - I managed to squeeze in 7 different chateau visits in just two days which left me feeling absolutely exhausted but not regretting a thing!

This weekend I'm off to La Rochelle (just above Bordeaux in France) with a French family I know so that should be awesome too! I have a date in Paris with the French and English soccer teams that will be playing a scratch match, then it's off to Italy for the weekend after that! So, yes, I'm making the most of France's fine location, but I'm also watching, with a lot of pain, the rapid drop in my bank accounts figures! But hey - you only live once!

Donating blood here in Troyes was a different experience, but certainly one to remember - so much for getting a token milkshake as a 'thanks for donating, see you again next time'. Try 'here's an entire meal with fresh baguette, ham, three types of cheese and some dessert'. Nice.

The university system really has proved to be quite different - there are three main components to each subject - "les cours, les TD's and les TP's" = the lectures, the tutorials and the labs. The lectures are very similar to ours, often in a large auditorium with 100 - 200 seats, but it depends on the size of the class - it can range from 15 to 200 students in one lecture.

The TD's are the most important where we go through questions and apply the theory we learn (or don't learn) in lectures and the TP's are pretty straightforward, run-of-the-mill lab sessions that go for too long and consist of doing some seemingly pointless experiments. The grading system works on a scale of 20 points and apparently a score of 14 is 'incroyable' (incredible).

There is a semester-long project, a mid-semester exam and a final exam worth 40%, 30% and 30% respectively - very different from Swinburne Eng subjects. I'm still in that awkward stage of not really knowing whether or not it's 'acceptable' here to approach the lecturer if you don’t understand something, so I'm just going to give it a little more time and hopefully build up the courage to approach my lecturers and say: "Have pity, I’m a foreigner." I'll let you know how that goes, but as for now it's off to an 8am class to begin a full day of classes finishing at 6pm so until next time!