HXI at Télécom SudParis

One battery, coming up! 🔋🧪

Hi there ! My name’s Hadrien, and I’m a French student at the Faidherbe prépa. But, what is a prépa you may ask ? It’s like a extension of high school, but way more focused on one field (such as biology, literature, or maths/physics/chemistry). It’s supposed to last two years long, and there’s some specifics about that as well, but, at the end of those two years, you pass an exam where you ought to be selected for schools (which are called les Grandes Écoles ie Great Schools) all across France. In my case, those schools are kind of engineering schools. The prépa course is possibly the hardest and the most rewarding one of the French Education System, as it often happens that some abandon it and go to uni less than a year in. It is, as most courses in France, entirely free.

I’m in 2nd year, in what is called a Classe Étoile (=Star Class), meaning I was one of the best of my class last year: we tend to aim for higher ranking schools. To be clear, I’m in MP*: the * tends for, well, Star, and the MP is for Maths-Physics, for those are our two main fields of study.

31/03, 10:26 P.M.

Doing some late night chemistry 🧪....

So, what is a prépa, what is Faidherbe, and what the heck does my url mean ? Well, first of all, let’s talk about prépas.

Prépas are very different from university/college: it’s a very intensive, two-years-long course, with around 35h of teaching per week, and 20h or personal work per week. It is not unusual that one or two student drop from this course the first year in order to go to university. Here’s an estimate of how much hour of work an average French student has, per week (purple is teaching, yellow is personnal, prépa is CPGE.

The main goal of the prépa course is to prepare us to enter what we call “les Grandes Ecoles” (hence CPGE for Classe Préparatores aux Grandes Ecoles) in a country-wide exam, at the end of those two years. However, if you don’t get the school you wanted to, you can always “cube”, i.e have another chance at taking the exam, at the price of another full year of prépa.

There are mutliples sorts of prépa:

The khâgne, where you study literature

The BCPST, where you study Biology

The ECS, where you study how to get filthy rich economy (stonks)

The MPSI and PCSI, where you focus on Physics and Engineering, and either Maths of Chemistry; after doing MPSI for a year, you can do MP (Maths & Physics) or PSI (Physics & Engineering), and after doing PCSI for a year, you can do PSI or PC (Physics & Chemistry)

And that’s about all there is to say on the prépa system ! There are also Star Classes, meaning they’re classes where only the very best can go: they’re written MP* or PSI* for example.