UCN : now here we are!

Hi guys ! Did we miss you ?

We just arrived so we had a lot of things to do , like moving to our flat for example !

But now here we are, and the lectures have startded. We study energy technology here, and we are in a special class composed only with foreign students. They are from Hungary, Latvia, Littuania, Poland.... Actually a lot of people are from eastern Europe. That is really nice, because that makes us speak in English, and we also can discover there cultures, the way they learn and so on.

We follow courses about energy of course, but also other stuff like innovation. Generally the contents are quite the same as in France : teacher is in front of us with his slides and he is speaking, and then solving problems and exercices. However, sometimes the lesson is difference. For example, our innovation teacher uses to make us play lego, she calls that « serious lego playing ». The point is that it helps us to improve our creativity, and as we work in groups, we can have different points of vue about the problem we have. This can seem pretty strange for french people, but it was really efficient.

Furthermore, the time management is not the same as in France here : the whole lecture is often scheduled for 3 hours. It seems very long but actually teachers use to make breaks every 45 minutes, and you can take a longer break if you want : here teacher trust the students, they let them take their responsibilities.

Indeed here, every semester, each student participates in a project in group, and it last the whole semester. Of course the subject is related with the subject of you studies.

To conclude, I just would say the educational systeme here is more open minded than in France, and they use every way they can to teach, even if it does not really seem serious, and that is a really good thing.

Axel.