• No results found

Personal Erasmus Report

N/A
N/A
Protected

Academic year: 2021

Share "Personal Erasmus Report"

Copied!
3
0
0

Bezig met laden.... (Bekijk nu de volledige tekst)

Hele tekst

(1)

Personal Erasmus Report

Kathelijne de Vrijer – Universidad de Salamanca – BA History -k.de.vrijer@student.rug.nl

Since my first year at the University of Groningen I knew I wanted to do a semester abroad in Spain. I study History and to be precise Medieval History so Salamanca was a perfect pick because of the rich history of the city and its university. I also knew a few fellow students that spent their Erasmus in the ‘Golden City’ and they came home with some amazing

experiences. So I signed myself up for Erasmus and wrote a application letter to the USAL (University of Salamanca). After I got excepted the communication from the USAL with me went quite smoothly. They sent me some digital information folders, in English too, and were able to sent me copies of everything I needed for the grant application forms pretty fast.

Once that was settled I needed to find some courses I could follow. It was not easy to find a schedule of courses or a timetable on the website of the USAL and with my level of Spanish it was a big challenge to navigate through the site. After a few days of digging into it I found four courses that were sort of in the line of my own education in Groningen and with only knowing the name of the course I filled in my Learning Agreement. Of course when I arrived in Salamanca I immediately heard from the other Erasmusstudents from the first semester that I had to change all my courses and should spend at least one week to sort out the timetable and which courses were accepted and possible to follow. It was a struggle for all of the history students and we spent a lot of coffee filled afternoons together solving this big puzzle. Luckily the faculty gives you a week to hand in your new choices and to matriculate. I was lucky to have a few new friends so that we could investigate this matter together because I’m not sure what would have happened if I had to do this all alone.

This being said, I like to point out that it is absolutely necessary to know Spanish. I didn’t and I spent my first few weeks teaching myself a crash course of the Spanish language.

I was lucky to only have Spanish speaking friends and I learned the language relatively fast.

But conversational Spanish is different from academic Spanish and I experienced some difficulty following my classes. The professors didn’t seem used to the presence of

international students in their classrooms and didn’t lower their speed of speaking. It’s scary to ask your professor in front of a full classroom to repeat what he just said. I should have taken a language course prior to my semester abroad.

(2)

The level of education at the USAL was surprisingly high. I say surprisingly because before I left Groningen everyone told me that is was a piece of cake studying in Spain. This may count for other universities in Spain but not for the course History in Salamanca. The style of teaching is very old fashioned in the sense that there is no participation required from the students and the professor continuously talks for one hour four times a week. Students are used to write down or copy everything he/she says and reproduce this without any analytic skill on the final exam. I am not used to this so the first classes and exams were a disaster. I advise everyone to start making contact with your fellow Spanish students because they can help you with these things and are more approachable than the professors. The USAL does not provide any ‘buddy-system’ so you either have to be a member of ESN or make friends of your own to get to certain information. They are however very welcome and open to

questions but that is on your own initiative.

Eventually I followed the following courses in the faculty of Geography and History;

Escuela de Salamanca – 6 ECT’s, Historia Moderna I – 6 ECT’s, Historia Antigua I Mundo Griego – 6 ECT’s and Historia II – 6 ECT’s. I only passed two of them. The ones I did pass were quite clear in their objective and way of testing. The other ones were one big chaos and we had the idea that not even the teacher knew what the course was really about. It is not unusual for Spanish students to be in the classroom 5 days a week for a full day. Also is it not weird when the teacher just doesn’t show up without leaving a note in advance. This is all very stressing and sometimes confusing and made me doubt the consistency of the course.

During the semester there were some so called ‘practicas’ and you should really pay attention as to when and about what these tests are. They can mean a big deal in the final note for the course. A problem with these ‘practicas’ is that some teachers don’t tell you the note you got on them until after the final exam. This way you’ll never know how you are doing throughout the semester.

Some things happened without any problems for me. For example finding a house.

There is a facebookpage where people post their houses with pictures and rent. I found mine through a friend who already studied there. My landlady was very nice and honest but the majority of the house owners in Salamanca is likely to rip you of in the end. Always be careful with deposits and paying rent cash. I don’t know if there was a campus on which you could live too. I arrived a few days before the semester started to get to know the city and in those few days there was a collective welcome from the faculty. At this welcome everything was explained and some forms were handed out. I can’t stress more the importance of knowing Spanish in these kinds of situations. The support in everyday life in the university

(3)

and the university night/weekend-life was completely organized by student organizations such as ESN and Salamanca Erasmus Trips which was part of a big company in Salamanca. I got

‘adopted’ by my roommates buddy from ESN and went on a lot of trips throughout Spain. It is the best way to get to know people and to make your Erasmus unforgettable.

My financial experience of Salamanca is that life is a lot cheaper than in the Netherlands. Everything from rent to shoes to beers is cheaper in Salamanca than in

Groningen. My room was 225 a month and I didn’t need to work a part-time job to pay for my daily expenses. What made my Erasmusyear expensive were the numerous trips I took with friends and all the other extracurricular activities the student organizations organized. These were all more than worth it and impossible to find them anywhere else cheaper.

To conclude, my biggest challenge was definitely to overcome my language arrearage and to make that work on my exams. The most interesting part for me was that even though I’m pretty travelled I still learned so many new things about other cultures from my new international contacts. Salamanca is very small and if you engage actively in the social networks and activities from the start you will create a big family of people around you that will maybe last a lifetime. To give an example; I started a Erasmus musicband with a Brazilian, a Belgian and a Peruvian. Like they say in Salamanca “Erasmus is not a year in your life, it’s your life in one year”. I completely agree.

Referenties

GERELATEERDE DOCUMENTEN

As we mentioned in section 3.4, according to Sil'nikov et a! [9], two curves of il'nikov bifurcations emanate from the point HSN. Sil'nikov et a! [9] have numerically computed

2 campus and with international ambassadors, students of the university there that help the international students, you have a lot of activities and get to know a lot of new people

A small difficulty of the process of signing up for the courses was that the university did not have an online registration progress, therefore to sign up you had

During the first semester of my third year in the bachelor programme of Media Studies, I went to Helsinki, Finland, to complete my Erasmus minor abroad.. In this report I will

Then during my stay in the United States I realized that for many people actually studying at Northern Arizona University for a longer period of time, it is hard to have the

The first week we could try all different courses without our attendance counting or being actually registered in the course, which was quite nice as it allowed us to orientate

In the week before my departure, I received an email with information about the ‘International Welcome Week’, which caused me having a lot of confidence in their reception

As far as I know these courses were tailored to exchange students too, which made the classrooms quite multicultural and multilingual and here too I would meet interesting