La vie étudiante

In light of the recent chute of my GPA, I would like to take a moment to comment on the difficulties of adjusting to student life in Paris.

1. Kafkaesque organization

A few weeks ago the elevator at Paris 7 broke. No problem, thought I and my co-exchange students, we are young and able-bodied! We shall take the stairs! No matter that this particular class, Histoire des Livres, meets on the seventh floor. We hiked up there only to arrive at this exquisite metaphor for the exchange student experience:


Yep, you have to pull, upholding the legacy of this masterpiece

Somehow we made it to class. Prying was involved. But that moment was really nothing compared to the process of registering to take the class:

• Step 1) Find a course list. As soon as most French students pick a major, the next three years are laid out for them, with a little leeway for the odd elective. This means that course catalogs are virtually not existent, or at least not readily available. Posted online? Dream on. I think most exchange programs assemble some sort of course list each year or each semester. Take advantage of this.
• Step 2) Verify that the courses that interest you actually exist. 2.A) This involves finding the secretariat of the department offering the course at your university. It could be anywhere in the city. Do not expect one department's staff to know where their "colleagues" in another discipline are located. I recommend Google. 2.B) Once you find the right office, try to go when it is open and - and this is crucial - the courses are posted. This will probably necessitate multiple visits: first to find out the office's hours, then to find out when they'll be posting the courses and when the department's courses start, a visit the day the courses were supposed to be posted, and another the day before the courses start when they are all actually up. Even if they do go up (on the wall, not online) on the specified date, check back the day before the course begins, just in case the room has changed. If you're feeling really brave or masochistic, try asking the secretariat for a list to take home. If she gives it to you, you will be a hero among your fellow study-abroaders

• Step 3) Go to the classes that look interesting and exist. At this point you need to be sure you can understand the professor, won't be expected to read 20 books in 10 weeks, and understand what you'll be graded on.
• Step 4) When you're sure you want to take the class (this pretty much has to be decided by the end of the first meeting), screw up your courage and present yourself to the professor. Ask if you can take the class. Since the system is so rigid and most French kids know what they're taking a year ahead of time, a lot of classes fill up that far in advance. If the professor welcomes you (and you really want him to welcome, not just tolerate you - that will end badly) you are free to register. The semester has officially begun.

2. Grèves

Some of you might remember this post from back in October. We Americans like to joke about the French's willingness to go on strike at the slightest imposition on their liberté, but they do take it very seriously -- or at least the subset of students who blockaded the main buildings of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne every Thursday through October did. Teachers responded to this in a variety of ways. Some organized classes at cafés during their courses' regular meeting times, others scheduled Saturday rattrapage sessions after things had calmed down. Mine gave us printed copies of her lecture notes, end of story. We were still responsible for the information at the end of the semester, and I was so scared of missing something I read everything I could find about the skipped classes' topic (seriously, ask me anything about Ethiopia during 19th century), but after three weeks without any kind of class (or even homework) it was a little hard to get back into the History of Sub-Saharan Africa during the 19th Century.

3. Loooong lectures

Facebook has ruined my generation. It's a highly debatable statement, but I think we can at least safely say that in the era of expressing yourself in 140-character tweets, attention spans have definitely shortened. (A word to the professors reading this blog: If your students are taking notes on a computer, they are going to check out their friends' status updates and new profile pictures sooner or later. This isn't a reason to ban laptops in your classroom, if we're going to space out, we're going space out.) In France, where children are trained to do hours of dictation in beautiful handwriting -- seriously, these kids not only highlight but whip out rulers to underline key points while writing down the professor's lecture verbatim -- they are unsympathetic to American's lack of cerebral endurance. Most courses meet for three hours, once a week, which coupled with my next point, means all-out sprints of intellectual effort separated by 6 days of "What classes are you taking?", "Um...let me think."

4. Two notes per semester

Okay, this one is only half a complaint. Do I want to be caged up in Beaubourg doing my devoirs when I could be at any number of parks and free museums? Hell no. But my entire grade for the each class depends on a paper (or worse, an oral presentation) and a final exam, which, much like the almost equally stressful phenomena of mid-terms and finals in America, tend to bunch up within the same two-week period for all classes. After five or six weeks of relatively smooth sailing, the weeks that count can best be described in three syllables that rhyme with fustercluck.

And they post your grades publicly.

5. Ugly, ugly buildings

Most Parisian universities have one or two flagship buildings (the Sorbonne's ancient, domed edifice most famously) from which they have expanded into smaller, often cramped buildings that may or may not be anywhere near the original. Paris 1's main building, with it's yucky concrete courtyard shrouded in cigarette butts and barricades, is the poster child for ugly publicly run higher education, but even at Paris 7's new, modern campus, graffiti is rampant. How it got there is a mystery - the door is almost always locked when I want to get in.