Les Premières Jours de School

So, I finally started what I came here to do: school. On Monday, I had my first class at l’Institute d’Études Politiques de Lyon. IEP is technically a part of Université Lumière Lyon 2, but it’s pretty much its own separate school. It is also one of a prestigious number of universities that French students actually have to apply to get in to…Normally, all French students who pass their BAC, or Baccalaureate, are automatically admitted into any university, save for les Grandes Écoles. So us EAP students have the choice to take classes there, or at Lyon 2, at one of 2 campuses (one of the Lyon 2 campuses is where all of our UC classes have been and where the study center is, the other is at Bron, a neighborhood 25 minutes away from the center of town) and I think I will be taking all of my classes this semester at IEP.

I started on Monday with a class called Institutions Internationales et Européennes, or quite similarly en Anglais, International and European Institutions. The material wasn’t too difficult to understand, and the professor didn’t speak too quickly or anything…but he definitely had some kind of crazy accent (he rolled his R’s!), and the class was also 3 hours long, so my attention span ran out rather quickly. But there are a lot of other étudiants étrangères (foreign exchange students) in the class of about 200 people, so I think we will all try to suffer through it together.

That class was a Cours Fondamental, or lecture. At IEP, the CF’s alone are worth about 4.5 UC units, so it isn’t even necessary to take a Cours de Méthode, or discussion section, which is another 3 units on top of that. But for the class that I’m going to tomorrow (Histoire de la France depuis 1940) I am going to do the CF and CDM in order to get a crapload of units that I can apply to either of my majors! In addition, there are also seminars and Cours d’Ouverture, which are kind of like elective classes. For students in France, there is usually a very strict schedule of which classes you can take each year, so it’s really cool that we get to choose between all of them. I’m not sure where Cours d’Ouverture fit in to the French students’ schedules, but I checked one out on Tuesday with another Santa Barbara student, Brett, about Socialism in Europe in the 20th century, which was SO interesting. The professor was also very easy to understand and well organized!

So today, I’m checking out the History class that I mentioned before, as well as a class about Globalization through the eyes of Hollywood (another Cours D’ouverture). So if I take all those classes, my unit total will be about 20 quarter units, which is a little more than most UC students usually take in a quarter!

But all in all, class is going pretty smoothly. In addition to my IEP classes, I also have a couple of classes with the other EAP students…we have Méthodologie twice a week, and every other Friday we have Societé Française. This class has kind of impeded everyone’s travel schedules, including mine, seeing as how we have our first class next Friday, 2 days after my birthday, on the day in which I was hoping to go to Oktoberfest in Munich to celebrate my 20th. But we’ll see, I’m still hopeful about my Oktoberfest birthday goal, although it will probably involve a pretty expensive plane ticket and me sleeping in a tent somewhere in Germany!