I have had many people say that they don’t believe that I’m in classes and just off galavanting in France because I feel like it. That couldn’t be further from true, yes I do galavant from time to time, but I am in classes. So I thought this a perfect opportunity to talk about the French University system and what classes I’m taking here in France and also address the idea of the romanticisation of study abroad.
My major here is called Lettres Modernes, a direct translation is Modern Letters, which I'm embarrassed to say, but until somewhat recently, I had no idea what that meant. Basically it’s a fancy way to say literature and language. Classes started in the middle of September, but I got started a little bit late. I had what I am referring to as the administrative hell tunnel, more on that later.
Here is a quick glossary of terms in relation to UNI that I will be using:
It took me a while, even after being explained how it works, multiple times, to understand these things, they aren't 100% comparisons, but easy enough to understand.
Université de Franche-Comté = University of Northern Iowa
UFR SLHS (Unité de formation et recherche, Sciences du langage, de l’homme. et de la société) = College of Humanities, arts, and Sciences (CHAS)
Scolarité de langues et de lettres = Languages and Literatures department
Lettres Modernes = French Department
In France, at least in the case of my university, students only attend university for 3 years to get their Bachelors, or Licence. Licence 1 (L1) is Freshman, L2, sophomore, and L3 is Junior. Another thing thats a bit different is the school ages. Here, students are all grouped by the year they were born, as opposed to the US’s usual September to August ages. So technically by my age, I would be in L4, which is already graduated, even though in the US I'm L3, though here I'm in L2, with the students born in 2003, but that is due to the way my program works. And like say, similar to in the US, age doesn't really matter.
When I arrived in Besançon, there was lots of confusion and complications with my registration. Something I have come to learn, that I plan on talking about in the future, is that communication styles are quite different here. In the US, I have found that the culture is almost over communicative and there is no shortage of support. Here, it’s different, which is not bad or good, it just means that there has been an adjustment period, and it also leads to a large development of independency. Throughout a lot of these processes, I have had to do a lot of the communicating and advocating for myself, which again has helped build character, but it’s also added to quite a bit of additional stress.
I spent the first 3 or so weeks here not quite sure when classes started, where I needed to be, or what was going on. We had our first international student orientation on September 8th, after most had already been registered for classes and starting to get into the swing of the semester. The orientation, which was geared mostly towards students only staying for a semester or a year, student’s who’s programs didn’t really have much opinion on what classes they were taking as long as they were in classes. The next week, classes officially started and I still had no idea what was going on. I had contacted numerous people and was left with little to no responses. Finally partially through the week I was able to get ahold of someone and explain that my program is complicated. They figured out that I wasn’t an Erasmus student (Erasmus is an exchange program for European students to study abroad for a semester or year somewhere else in Europe), I'm diploma seeking and here longer-term, therefore, complicated. One of the frustrations I had throughout this process is that my program is quite small, I believe I am one of seven students, most of which were pre-covid. So I don’t by any means expect everyone to know the program. Very few people know it at UNI, it's fairly new, so some level of explaining is expected. Though I found that all of the lack of knowledge was within my department, and half the time I was found explaining the program, which I didn't quite have a full understanding of at the time. In the English department, which is part of the SLHS, but not the Scolarité de langues et de lettres, are where all the people who understand the program better than me are located. The people I have talked to, whom I am extremely grateful, have been the most welcoming to me here, are extremely helpful and did help advocate for me, but as they aren’t in my department, there was very little they could do to help me through the registration process. My support team back in the US, (who I am eternally grateful for, they are amazing and they put up with all of my shenanigans and frustrated rants) did what they could as well, though some things were just lost in the differences in communication. These few weeks were spent going into the office every day to see what had been progressed, and attending what I had hoped were the correct classes (spoiler: most of them weren’t). There were questions to how many credits I needed, what languages I was eligible for in the foreign language category, and a last minute IT class (yes... I know…) that was where the most of the stress was.
All of this registration complication did mean that I wasn’t in the correct classes until week three, including some of which until weeks four and five, and I wasn’t able to access wifi on campus, email, or CROUS, the student restaurant, until mid October. I referred to this whole administrative process as the administrative hell tunnel. At *almost* all times I was optimistic that it would be over soon, and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, but all around me, was a bit of chaos and frustration. At about this time also, is when I started to hit a wall with being in French all the time. Though it’s funny, because with most things in life, you look back and laugh. I definitely got way overworked up over it really not being that big of a deal. I wouldn’t repeat that period for a million dollars (maybe a million and one) but I do look back and think that it was necessary to happen the way it did. I am more knowledgable because of it.
But now things have all been cleared up, and I much better understand the system, so hopefully registration in future semesters will go much smoother. I have been placed in L2, so the second year of the program, next year I will finish L3. I am in 11 classes this semester, which seems like a lot, but they only meet once a week and in general, homework is extremely rare besides reading the material, studying for exams, and a couple projects, which is typically best for my learning style.
The classes
At UFC there are two types of classes, CM and TD, though in my major there is very little, if any, difference between the two. CM or cours magistraux are your typical lecture classes. And TD or travaux dirigés, smaller sized classes and more student discussion and projects. Sometimes you’ll have a section of each, sometimes just one or the other, sometimes back to back, sometimes more spread out. Most of mine are back to back with basically no distinction between the two so I am in certain classes for two hours, luckily most of my professors give a break in the middle. One challenge that I do find as well, is that they don't give out a syllabus in classes, or not even anything similar, so I don't even know the goals of most of my courses, and some of them, I have no understanding of how the course title relates to what we're actually covering in class. Another difference, professors don't hold office hours. There are student elected tutors who hold office hours, and I have met with the L3 tutors multiple times, which is helpful, but the advice is usually, go to class and fake it until you make it. So that's exactly what I'm doing, and with that being said, I understand probably 90% of what's said.
The grading system is a bit different as well. Instead of the usual A, B, C, D, and F as well as 4.0 GPA scale, students are graded from 0-20. 10 out of 20 is passing, most students will fall in the 12-16 range, and from what I understand, a 20 is rare. I am not sure if there is a GPA scale or if they have an overall average of grades, probably. In all honesty, while I do typically like to aim for those A's and B's, here I'm just aiming to pass, so the 10-12 range. In my essays I make many grammatical errors just because French isn't my native language, which does knock down points, so as long as I pass and move on to the next semester, I'm happy.
Monday
Français 3 TD 13h-14h
On Monday’s I attend Français 3, this class is part of the Transversal language requirement. I had hoped to take German to add another language to my repertoire, though the German 1 is not actually level 1 for beginners, it is the first semester in college German for those who have already studied German, which I have not. So I did settle for French 3, perfectionnement de la langue. This class is designed for international students, and I do find that it’s quite easy, but I’ll take an easy class any day with the amount of difficult classes I’m in.
Tuesdays
Easily my hardest day, I am in classes for 6 hours straight in the afternoons.
Littérature et éducation TD 9h-10h
Tuesday mornings I attend a class called literature and education. We are mostly studying La Fontaine’s Fables, and it is a super interesting class, though I am not quite sure where the education part comes in but I do my best.
Histoire du Livre CM and TD 13h-15h
This class is one of my favorite classes. History of books. We’ve talked a lot about printing presses and the Gutenberg, different fonts and how they evolved, calligraphy, illustrations in books. I am learning so much in this class and the professor is so sweet, you can just tell she cares so much about what she’s teaching, which in my opinion is what makes a professor good.
Littérature et société TD 15h-16h
I started this class quite late, so I’ve pretty much been lost the whole time. Though I’m getting caught up. We are reading Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal, which is a book written (or at least takes place in) Franche-Comté. It’s a pretty large book, and because I’m by no means fluent I’m a pretty slow reader so it’s taking some time to get caught up, but this class has lots of connections to how society functioned in the Napoleonic era and comparisons to today.
Histoire de la langue: latin et ancien français TD 16h-17h
This class is also really interesting but makes my brain hurt. At the moment we are going through the base of the latin language, which is incredibly interesting and I’m loving it, but with that being said, I still have a complicated relationship with Latin. I think knowing Latin roots and understanding it to understand how French and even English came to be is crucial, but I find the language incredibly difficult and don’t understand why just about every word conjugates. I have tried to understand Latin a handful of times over the past few years, and just don’t understand. This class though is the most in depth Latin class I’ve ever taken, and I’m not sure trying to learn Latin from French is the best move, but we’re doing our best.
Littérature Comparée: Littérature et Genres CM 17h-19h
I have some words for this class. It's a bit frustrating at times. It’s my longest class, 2 hours on Tuesday evenings (after 4 hours straight of classes) and 2 hours on Wednesday mornings. It’s incredibly interesting as well, however, it is complicated and frustrating, even for many of the French students. The class started with a lot of work from the previous year, luckily after communicating, I have been given a pass because I was not here. In this class, I understand the words being said, but I have no context. We are following a lot of feminist literature, which also is extremely interesting, but a lot of what I’m learning for this class is from what I’m doing outside of class, in class I’m usually quite lost. We are reading Ne me libère pas, je m'en charge, a collection of essays significant in Feminist literature. It's not just French literature either, most is, but there's some Mary Wollstonecraft (Mary Shelley's mother), among a few others. We are doing presentations on specific parts, and I am doing mine, with another student, on Olympe de Gouges's Declaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of rights of women and of [female] citizens).
Wednesday’s
Littérature Comparée: Littérature et Genres TD 10h-12h
This is the TD for my Tuesday evening class, but there’s no difference except that its an extension of the day before.
Outils d’informatique et documentation TD 15h-16h
My information Technology class… Luckily this class was only 6 weeks, I took the final exam last week. I did miss the first four weeks of this class, and it was probably the best class to miss four weeks. This class was basically a crash course on Office 365 like Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. It was extremely easy, but that’s coming from me… sooooo…
Thursday’s
My favorite day
Littérature du XIXe Siècle CM and TD 10h-12h
This class is great. This is what I was expecting my classes would be like here. The professor's accent is a little bit difficult to understand, but I get by, and it gets easier every week. We are reading Baudelaire’s collection of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal. I have read a few of these poems in the past for other French classes, and I love poetry, so this is a good class. I’m not sure that studying only one book of poetry is a good summary of all of 19th century literature, but if it’s good enough for the degree, it’s good enough for me. And I ove Baudelaire, I did a project on him in my French literature class back at UNI, and it's probably one of my favorite projects I've ever don, so reading more of his work is really cool.
Littérature du XXe Siècle CM and TD 13h-15h
This class is also amazing. We have read a bunch of excerpts from Sartre, Camus, and Proust, among others, and we are about to start Les âmes fortes by Jean Giono. 20th century literature is probably my favorite century to read from. This century is where we start to see the emergence of a lot of typical French ideas in literature like existentialism and personal philosophies. I do believe that a lot of what I read outside of class was inspired by some of these great works of this century, (I mean, my favorite author has mentioned some of these works in his books multiple times) so reading these excerpts is really fun and exciting to me. I have added a few of the full texts from the excerpts to my TBR (to be read).
Travail d’études et de recherche 15h-17h
This is another class that I have no idea what’s going on. I’m not really sure the goal. The title translates to "work in studies and research". Half the time it’s canceled, the other half of the time we only have the class for an hour, and when we do have class, I have no idea what’s going on. Last week we wrote reflections on how the semester is going, one week we had to attend an hour conference over a weekend that was incomprehensible due to technical difficulties. I think this class is a homeroom type deal, but I really couldn’t tell you. I just show up and do what is told of me, but it is canceled so often that there isn't enough information to know what is going on. Luckily, because it is the professor that cancels, I'm not missing anything.
Friday’s
Grammaire Française: Morphologie Lexicale et grammaticale 8h-10h
Of course my only 8am class is on a Friday morning. It’s great because it means my weekend starts at 10am, but I’m not a morning person. So I’m always walking in at 7:59 with a double espresso in hand. Content wise, I am loving this course as well. When I took a linguistics class last semester, morphologie was my least favorite unit (I just didn't understand it), but after taking this class, I am falling in love with Morphologie. My heart still belongs with phonetics, the study of sounds, but morphologie is climbing up there. For my non linguist friends, morphology is the study of parts of words. Phonetics is the study of sounds, and morphology is putting them into words. Think prefixes, suffixes and roots, there’s a lot more to it, but thats the basics.
This class has also sparked my most recent fascinations, etymology and evolutionary linguistics. These are two concepts that I'm just starting to internet dive during my own free time, so we've just barely touched the iceberg, but I find them incredibly fascinating and I think they could be one of my favorite language related topics.
So that is a rough breakdown of all my classes this semester! These classes are really difficult at times. I do get frustrated quite easily, because I’m not a fluent French speaker and I do miss parts of class just due to comprehension. My classes in general are very lecture based with the occasional class input, but generally its the professor speaking in front of the room, and the students sit and take notes. The professors don’t teach off of slides, and typically don’t write on the board either, which being a very visual learner has been a difficult adjustment. In high school and even quite often at UNI, classes would be dry at times, but there would often always be moments that are a little more interesting. In class activities to interact with other students, professors would add in some humour here and there, and just general animation. Here, that isn’t much the case. The classes here are extremely dry, the professors don’t really animate the classes, and while they may crack a joke here or there, my French isn’t quite advanced enough that I catch it. And unfortunately due to the lack of class collaboration, I don’t really know anyone in my classes, I’m starting to get there, but it all just takes some time.
With all of these difficulties I have had to face in the past two months in regards to les académiques, I think something that’s often overlooked in the study abroad world is that at times it is over romanticised. Study abroad is life changing, it’s beautiful, and already in two months I am a completely different person than I was before I arrived. Something thats often overlooked is that yes, it is extremely difficult at times. And I was extremely well prepared to know that I would face challenges here, both from my pre-departure meetings, from past experiences both abroad and at home, knowing people who had studied abroad, and researching myself. I was extremely well prepared, but really, you can only prepare so much, and I feel like also, you don’t acknowledge that it could happen until it does.
Unfortunately I think that school is my least favorite part of living in France, which is often frustrating because it is the number one reason I’m here. And that isn’t to say that I hate my classes, I actually generally really like them, but it’s not my favorite aspect of living in France. It is slightly discouraging when I am talking to French students not in my degree, and when they ask what I’m studying their response is usually « wow bonne chance. » Even for French students, Lettres Modernes is difficult, and the fact that I am able to get by when French isn’t my first language, incredibly over powers that discouragement. But it does prove how study abroad is romanticised. I definitely romanticised it and I was definitely welcomed with a harsh awakening in how difficult my classes are and the administrative system is. I knew it would be difficult, but it’s much more difficult than I had let myself believe. For a while, I was talking pretty seriously about looking into going to grad school, but after these past several weeks, I've started to put that idea aside. That's not to say that it will never happen, but I'm not going to rush right into a master's program like I had wanted. And who knows, the right moment may come.
With that being said, I still love Besançon, and France. The experience here so far has been better than anything I ever could have asked for because it isn’t perfect. I have said this multiple times and I will keep saying it, perfectionism is boring. I love that every day here is different and with each difference is a new opportunity to learn, whether that be through challenges or successes. Yep, its difficult at times, but there is so much more here to smile about. And it's even more motivation to work harder. I love the river, I have a favorite bench, and my favorite thing to do on that bench is read, whether it's books from my favorite author or books for class. I love walking through the city, especially at sunset, and when there's lots of people around. I love speaking and being surrounded by the French language all day. I'm learning so much, and it's all related to the thing I love. It's hard work, but I know it'll all be worth it in the end!
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