Jessica van Loenen - j.van.loenen@student.rug.nl
In the first semester of the academic year 2018-2019 I went to Lille, France for an Erasmus exchange in order to get a French language mention on my European Languages and Cultures bachelor’s degree. Given that my profile in Groningen is the linguistics profile, in France I followed courses from the Sciences du langage program at the Université de Lille, campus pont de bois. Before, the university was split up in three separate parts but since the year I studied there all three parts had been merged to one.
Before departure, a lot of things have to be arranged of course. The website of the university of Lille is not very clear, but I eventually I managed to find a document that contained all the courses I could pick from. I could pick from all the second and third year courses of the Sciences du langage program, as well as courses of the Lettres Modernes program. I chose most of my courses from Sciences du langage, as this is what I like most. I also took two courses from Lettres Modernes. In total I had 9 courses, because all courses are worth 3 ECTS so in order to obtain 25 ECTS I needed at least 9. I changed some of the courses I initially selected when I arrived, because of some conflicts in the time table, which you only get when the classes start. So in the end, the courses I took were: Bases sémantiques de la catégorisation (quite difficult, but also somewhat interesting), Phonologie contemporaine (really interesting and very fun teacher), Syntaxe de la phrase complexe (also very interesting, the teacher was very nice), Linguistique comparée (not very difficult, quite interesting), Linguistique
diachronique (a lot of repetition of courses I already took in Groningen), Acquisition (rather difficult, very specific and the teacher refuses to speak at an audible volume), Le roman de l’école (not very interesting for a linguistics student), Analyse du discours (I could not find the link between this course and linguistics) and Ancien français (this was definitely my favorite course!). Luckily I passed all of my courses, so I did not need to stress about obtaining the remaining ECTS.
In general, I think the communication with the university of Lille could have been better.
I very often felt like I had to find out everything for myself. Of course this is something I am used to as a university student, but in another country things might be somewhat different so you don’t always know how to arrange certain things. For example, it was not very clear which persons you had to address in case you had any questions or any problems. Moreover, France is notorious for its bureaucracy and not without reason!
Whenever you need something arranged or a document signed, it takes a lot of time. I
had to wait for a very long time before I got all the documents signed before departure,
but also when I came back I had to wait a couple of months before I knew all of my
grades (one of them somehow got lost, luckily they did find it in the end). It’s not as if
they’re not willing to help you, because all of the employees of the international services
are very nice and very willing to help, just give them some time!
Jessica van Loenen - j.van.loenen@student.rug.nl
The university of Lille can offer you a very affordable room in most cases, unfortunately I wasn’t elected for one at first. Therefore I already found a room via AirBNB, but later I got an email that I could still get a room of the university. I could no longer cancel my AirBNB, so I did not accept the offer. The rooms offered by the university are much cheaper than renting a private room, and often more complete, as they have their own kitchen and bathroom. On the other hand, you live pretty isolated from the city because the campus is in one of the suburbs. Moreover, the other residents of the university rooms don’t seem to be very interested in making contacts so I have heard it can be pretty lonely. I had a pretty different experience, because my room was not that far from the city centre of Lille and I had really nice “colocs”. It was just a lot more expensive.
Living expenses in France are generally slightly higher than in the Netherlands,
groceries for example are somewhat more expensive, so you’re probably going to need a little bit more money compared to what you normally need, also because you probably want to discover the city a little! Public transport is really cheap by the way, you can get an unlimited metro/ bus/ tram card for 29 euros a month. Another thing that’s different in France is that you need to have an “assurance d’habitation”. It is not expensive, but you need to have it. Some insurance companies want you to have a French bank account for paying this, others don’t. For the rest you probably won’t need the bank account.
The reception at the university was a bit chaotic, I did not get a lot useful information from this meeting. Also the planning of this meeting was not great, because classes wouldn’t start for another week. It does give you time to get to know the city of course.
The quality of the education in France is in my opinion slightly lower than in the Netherlands. Most of my courses were not very difficult, the level of French was also very much okay. In general, the teachers were easier to understand than the French students because the teachers speak in a much more clear way. Most of the classes should be seminars, but don’t expect a seminar as you’d expect in Groningen. The classrooms are much larger, sometimes up to 80 students. The teacher speaks for two hours (no breaks) and the students don’t get much room for interaction. Some of the younger teachers used powerpoints etc, but the older teachers generally did not. The powerpoints are often not put on the electronic learning environment (moodle), so it is important to write along during the classes. Sometimes this even means choosing between listening and copying of the blackboard/ screen. The teachers are not as approachable as the teachers in Groningen, in France the teacher has a much higher position than a student. For someone who is not used to this, it can feel pretty
denigrating. The French students are not very open to international students, in the
case of Sciences du langage they already knew each other really well so they don’t
need to make new contacts. It can be quite difficult to get in touch with them, although
that also depends on what you are like yourself (open, introverted etc.). The support
Jessica van Loenen - j.van.loenen@student.rug.nl
