It has been almost one month since I came back to China. Looking back to the last year’s oversea study in 3 different European countries, I think I have much to say, about the study, the life and the experience I went through.
The program I attended belongs to the family of Erasmus Mundus Programs organized by European Commission. Particularly, it is MA of International Trade and European Integration organized by University of Antwerp, University of Lille I and Prague University of Economics as well as other 4 universities from Europe. As a student, I am required to take commuting studies in all of these colleges, which means in each of the country, I need on average to stay and study for 4 months. I think this is the main feature and specialty of this program, which emphasize diversity and international integration in education, not only in the knowledge you learn, but also in the way they practically organizing the courses and designing the studying map of route.
A difference that I can feel clearly in this program is their stress on both theoretical acknowledge and practical experiences of study. Initiated and inspired by Bacon Francis, European people really have a good and long history for loving of empirical and practical study. This can be seen from the first activity we did right after we arrived at Antwerp: To visit the great harbor of Antwerp which is the largest business harbor in Europe and the fourth one in the world. This is their logic. Before the stock and complicated theory you have to come across in the textbook, you are given a humanistic guide in the real harbor, witnessing everything that you can possibly imagine and are willing to learn from the theory. This seemingly casual arrangement could imperceptibly raise you interests of study, even you might not discover it at once.
When the formal courses began, students were distributed into different countries to start their first semester. My host school was University of Lille 1 of France, which ranks number two in public universities in the country. The thing impressed me most was the high efficiency of the faculty. Actually, there was only one professor who took charge of almost everything for our foreign students. He helped us to find accommodation, taught our three lectures organized a travel to Paris for us and even threw welcome and farewell parties on us. The lectures taught in France were not easy because of their famous tradition of mathematics. However, with the professional and solid training in WISE, I really survived well and earned good marks. I like the way the professor taught in the class. Not only focusing on purely technical skills, he also showed us a lot of intuitive stories and organized brain storm in the classroom. We realized that we were not only learning the given theories from the book, but also tracking the growth of them and applying them to the real world. One year later, I can still feel the passion I born when I was studying in his courses.
The student life in University of Antwerp is of another style. After the first semester, all our classmates gathered together in this historical and charming campus. Since the courses’ design emphasized Policy and Empirical parts of International Trade, we needed to discuss in small group frequently. Beside the schooling time, we even had time to together and attended a party every month. These experiences never grow old in my memory. Although for the first sight, people might think the time spent on those extra-curricular activities would have side-effects on academic developed, actually it was just to the opposite. The get-together made all of our classmates close to each other, which itself was a practice and standing example of integration behavior we were going to study. Moreover, the long-run advantage of this kind of good relationship has proved its value as time passed. We had more chances of understanding each other, which helped us a lot when in the class we are required to divide into small workshops to discuss our opinions on European policies and Economics models.
For my last semester, I travelled to Prague where courses became intensive again. We were busy with lectures from early in the morning to later afternoon. Since this was our last semester, we also needed to select our future supervisor for the dissertations. The careful and thoughtful design of the process for students to select potential supervisor was really impressive. As prevalent in other European Universities, the selection was a two-way choice. Professors selected students according to their interest and academic performance of the first two semesters. At the same time, students also had the rights to select professor, according to their knowledge of professor’s research fields and their preferences. Noteworthy was that the program organized a bilateral face-to-face symposium meeting of all the student and professors. Just imagine that you are in a free market trying to selling your own idea and buying the things you prefer, all the procedures were transparent and market-based. Two students could compete for one supervisor, vice versa. This was really interesting but also competing. This experience told me that, although the European students behaved casually as usual, they were really used to and well prepared for this important meeting.
Between these three main semesters in universities, we were guaranteed one week of holiday for each of them. For travelling, this was the best timing. As all my classmates did, I tried to walk through of all of the Europe. Travelling endowed me the opportunity to experience multi-cultural societies, diverse nationalities and colorful and charming natural and cultural places of interest. This proved of great help for my later graduating dissertation writing, which is focus on the labor market performance of immigrants in France. To be honest, before it happened, I did not expect that the tourist pieces of information I gained in the casual life might be a great hint for a later interesting academic discovery.
To end this small essay, I would like to quote the famous sentence from Mark Twain: You might never know the Mississippi unless you experience it, as always. If I can add one more, that is, it would be even the same for Europe.
