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.