Student life in Lyon is quite a bit different than at Queen’s. People don’t seem to take school as seriously as they do in Kingston, and classes and exams so far have been less intense. The benefit of this and the pass-fail system at Queen's for students on exchange is that you don’t have to be entirely focused on coursework, so you have more opportunities for cultural experiences and getting to know students from around the world.
I’m finding it fairly easy to follow along in class, but depending on the professor’s accent I sometimes have trouble. The hardest is slang – they don’t teach you Lyonnais slang in French class. Reading is the easiest, but I think this is probably true with any language. Part of the reason I wanted to do my exchange in France was that I could practice my French. Although I did 13 years for French Immersion (almost all my classes in French) from Kindergarten to Grade 12 and have a Bilingual High School Diploma, I haven't had many opportunities to use it since high school. I'm very grateful for this chance to put it to good use!
The way courses are organised is also very different here. The schedule is different every week, and you only find out what classes you will have the Friday before. This makes it pretty difficult to make any kind of plans! The class sizes are pretty small for the higher levels, around 25 students. In France, to get into engineering school, or "École Supérieur" (which is distinct from regular univeristies), you have to study in a Prépa ( École Préparatoire) for 2 years after high school, or go to a normal university in a science program for 2 years to prepare for the admission exams. After that you have 3 years at the engineering university, which gives you a “Bac + 5”, which the equivalent of a master’s degree. However, most of the courses I need to substitute for my 3rd year Queen’s courses are in what would be in France 4th year level or Master’s level courses. There is no set exam period, so for this semester I have them from November until the end of January. Spring semester goes until the end of June. Many exams are open book. I had an exam recently on Gene Chips, where I was asked to summarize the given paper on a gene chip technique (which was conveniently in English), and answer a few questions that were straight out of the paper. You could have aced the exam without ever having been to class! I’m a little anxious about some of the other ones coming up, but overall I’ve found the workload is much less than in Canada. We almost never have assignments and I only have 5 labs this semester.
Warning: minor rant about residence ahead! My residence room makes me wish for the old Leggett days, 4 flights of stairs (no elevator!), no common room, and the worst internet ever! Apparantly they haven’t updated the system since they installed it 5-6 years ago, when there was only a small fraction of students that had computers in their room. Now everybody has laptops, and the internet is so slow no I can’t even load my gmail account most days! On top of that, my building (unlike all the others) doesn’t have wifi even though we pay the same monthly rate as the ones that do, so I had to go out and get myself an ethernet cable. For the first two weeks there was no internet at all, and my electronic key to get into the residence complex and into my building didn’t work and the machine to fix it was broken. This meant I couldn’t leave my building without somebody else or risk being locked out! What I do like about my room is the big window and the relatively new cabinets.
Thankfully they have an Ikea in Lyon, which made it fairly easy to get set up. I bought the same duvet cover I have in Kingston, a little touch of home!
My residence room.
Overall, life in France is quite different than back home, with lots of pleasant surprises and a few unpleasant ones (like the incredibly complicated residency permit process). I especially like how people here put an emphasis on enjoying life, and not just working all the time. It’s made me realise that people really work a lot back home! For example, kids here have no school on Wednesdays until they’re about 11, and the minimum number of weeks of vacation per year is 5 weeks! I certainly miss how efficient things are back home, and a lot less waiting in line, which seems to be very common. You wait for hours at the bank, the prefecture, the cell phone company, the school office, the residence office... only to find out they don't have what you need. Although I’m really looking forward to going home for Christmas, I’m really glad I have the opportunity to expeirience life in France.
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