#study aborad

But the French kids don’t really even pick their classes. Everyone in their major takes the same courses at the same times, so all their classes are with the same kids. Also, all our classes are in one building. I feel like I’m back in high school sometimes.

You only have each class once a week, and their classes are worth half the credits of ours, so I signed up for 13 classes last semester and 11 for this one. Most of my classes are two hours long. One of them is four hours long (help).

Classes don’t all start and end the same week, it depends on the number of class hours and the professor’s preference. And if he or she cancels a class, there’s a make-up week at the end of the semester to reschedule it.

There’s not as many classes scheduled for Monday or Friday because those days are when we have all our exams. So last semester, every day was a three-day weekend for me (more like four since I only had one class on Monday). That was really nice, but that much free time can really derail your motivation and the resulting 8 a.m.-6 p.m. class days I had Tuesday through Thursday could be exhausting.  

The content of the classes is a lot more lecture than discussion. They don’t assign as many readings as American professors, but it’s certainly not a year free from homework. A lot of classes have the midterm and final as the only grades.

Speaking of grades, they grade on a scale from 1 to 20 here. Ten is passing (for MU students studying abroad here), 12 is a B+, 14 and above is an A. And as they told us at orientation, “Twenty is for God alone, 19 is for the professor, 17 and 18 is for blowing the professor away, and 16 is really really good.” I think professors grade a little easier on the international kids, because all my grades were between 13 and 19.

All in all, school in France, in French as an international student is challenging, but not overwhelming. There were some times I stayed up super late writing papers or studying, but that was my own fault for procrastinating. I got good grades (at least on the midterms, we still don’t know our final grades), but I had to work for them. Even though it’s obviously harder to keep up in lectures here, I never leave class feeling totally lost.

So if you’re considering studying abroad, taking college courses in another language may seem daunting, but I encourage you to try. You can always drop the class or switch to an English class if it turns out to be too much, but it’s a lot easier to rise to the challenge than you may think. Taking classes in French has majorly strengthened my listening comprehension and familiarity with the language — skills that my friends who only took classes in English admit they couldn’t develop on their own.