• Question: Did you have any experience with education abroad ?

    Asked by haras to Alex, Claire, Kate, Marcus, Neil on 17 Jun 2014.
    • Photo: Alex Lyness

      Alex Lyness answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Hey Haras,

      I took one of my Uni modules studying at Groningen University in the Netherlands but that was only for a few months.

      Best ask Kate as she should know about what it’s like to be an American over here in the UK.

    • Photo: Claire Brockett

      Claire Brockett answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Hi haras,
      I didn’t take any of my education abroad, but we’ve quite a few PhD students in our group that are international students. Also, there are plenty of engineering degrees that offer a year in industry or study abroad. Would that be something that interests you?

    • Photo: Marcus Johns

      Marcus Johns answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      I personally don’t, but my brother has just spent a year in Toulouse studying chemistry. French universities are slightly different from UK ones in that they have separate campuses for each ‘area’ – engineering, sciences, social sciences and the arts. A lot of the French students also go to university near to where their parents live, so often live at home and drive to-and-from campus (unlike in the UK where most of us try to get a reasonable distance away from our parents!) I’ve also had friends that have gone to study for 6-12 months in Spain, Italy, Germany and New Zealand to name a few places.

      If you’re thinking of going down this route, one thing to bear in mind is that local languages can take precedence over the official language of the country – I’ve had friends that have gone to spend a year in Barcelona at the university thinking that they’d be lectured to in Spanish and discovered that certain lecturers prefer to speak Catalan (the language of the region), which isn’t at all similar to Spanish…

    • Photo: Kate Niehaus

      Kate Niehaus answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      I went to college in the United States, where the education system is a bit different than in Britain. Rather than studying one subject area throughout college, we take a broad range of classes and “major” in one subject, which means that we take more classes in that subject area towards the end of our degree. College is also four years, rather than the three years for many degrees in the UK.

      Is there anything specific that you are curious about?

Comments

  • Photo: haras

    haras commented on :

    Thank you, very much. I was only asking because I’m not English. I originally come from Poland/Switzerland, and I’m only going to school in England for this year. I was wondering if any of you knew the differences in the educations, and if it would be better for me to “stay at home” or come back to the lovely United Kingdom to go to college. But thank you for your answers…