Martin & Marseille

Time to write something about my school.

One thing I didn't know about my school was it's official name. Now the official name is EGIM / Ecole Centrale Marseille.
France-experts will be going 'Ooooohhhh....' now. Here's what I found out:

If you want to be an engineer in France, you can get the best possible education at all at the Polytechnique near Paris - students from Karlsruhe might now that one from the 'Tripartite' Program. However, it's pretty impossible to get there, unless you're brilliant and lucky (or you go via ERASMUS). Right after the Polytechnique come the Ecoles Centrales. Get it? Ecole Centrale Marseille! I'm at a top notch elite french engineering school. While that might look good on my CV if I ever apply somewhere in France, it also means more work than I had anticipated.

However, in France, before work - there's fun. At least at this school.

After summer, there's a Rentree. And a school with a budget like mine does a huge Rentree. In fact, I've spent most of the 10 days I was here just playing games, meeting people, going to loads of parties etc. Of course I cheated and joined all possible Rentrees, one for the foreigners, one for first-year students, one for third-year students (that's me). There's loads of booze, sometimes free food, music....
Even german music: One game was inventing a stupid dance to any song, one of the groups chose the German Schlager Moskau.
The school is massively well equipped with things to do: it even has it's own sailing boat. There's lots of clubs, music, sports... everything. The sad side of all of this is the french education system is not really fair towards the students who don't get to go to a Grande Ecole. The normal universities aren't really that good.

To put you into perspective: There are only 5 Ecoles Centrales in France, mine has about 600 students and is planning to expand to 900. There's a couple of other good schools (like the ones in Grenoble, I think), but it's only a lucky minority who gets to go there.

On the other hand, students at the EGIM get treated really well. The school is very concerned about every student and makes sure everyone has a broad education - in the first year, you are required to take a sport class. Because the EGIM is the result of a merge of 4 schools, there's way more staff than anywhere else, which means to teacher to student ratio is incredible. In fact, this has some absurd consequences: Because the classes are bigger after the merge (about 100 students max), they have to split them up because there aren't any lecture halls or class rooms big enough for everyone. So they do the exact same class at the same time - because they have too few rooms and too many teachers!
But the equipment at this school is amazing. Everyone really makes an effort.

French students do a lot more than german students. However, classes progress really slowly and even for me it's easy to get along. I've joined a class about computer tools I don't really need, but I like the slow speed it goes along and I can learn some technical language, too. Today, we did 4 hours of revising C (the programming language). It's bloody impossible to write code on an AZERTY keyboard if you're not french, but the exercises were so easy I managed to get along quite well. Remember: this is a class for the final year. In germany, someone tells us to learn C, that's it.
Other classes with other teachers and other subjects, they're difficult for me. Yesterday we had an introduction to signal processing classes, and all I understood that the Prof was telling us important stuff we needed to know during the year.

What's really annoying me though is the paperwork. In fact, I've got to do some.

Marseille, the oldest port in Europe. The oldest city in France and the second largest. The home of 'head butt' Zidane. My new home.

So what's it like?

You can easily tell Marseille grew over the centuries. Ever quartier is different from the other, there's old forts guarding the waterside, tiny roads going up and down, but never straight on...
The place is a mess, though. There's so much rubbish lying around it makes the Karlsruhe campaign to reduce the amount of stuff chucked on the ground look like a joke. There's roadworks or other building sites all over the place and so far I haven't found a place to just sit and relax.

Most of the beaches are extremely touristy but nice, although we did a hike into the Calanques the other day, a rocky coastline with some absolutely beatiful views and some quiet places to go swimming, sunbathing or rock climbing - I actually got a bit of a tan.

The people here rarely seem to be in a hurry, even in the biggest Pietonne noone's rushing around and bumping into you.

The area I live looks quite rough, really - lots of fenced-off roads, old houses... but it's OK, and getting into town isn't much of a problem, thanks to a pretty good transport system - as long as there isn't a creve (sorry, I can't to accents on this QWERTY. And I'm not using an AZERTY - they're designed to drive non-french people nuts).

I wonder what I'll think about Marseille in 6 months time.