Sofia Falzoni, Sciences Po Exchange, Full Year 2012-2013
Last week, I began my second semester at Sciences Po. After more than a month of winter vacation, it feels good to go back to a routine– waking up, having breakfast, taking the metro to Rue du Bac and walking the nice, three long blocks on Boulevard Saint Germain. Taking a right on Rue Saint-Guillaume to find about one hundred Sciences Po students smoking outside the main Sciences Po building and squeezing past them to get to class on time.
This semester I am taking four classes in French and two in English—just the opposite of what I did last semester. I feel more confident about my French skills this semester, and my comprehension skills are especially much better than they were in the beginning of last semester, so understanding my professors is not that much of an obstacle… the bigger obstacle is staying focused for two hours, which is how long Sciences Po classes are.
Thankfully, Sciences Po has these life-saving espresso vending machines, which I go to at least twice a day. Café au lait, café noisette, cappuccino, café long, café court, café vanille… anything you want to keep you caffeinated and awake for class!
All of the workload is distributed the first week of class, which means that all of the exposés are also all distributed during the first week of class. This includes students fighting to get the best topic for a presentation/to get a good date for a presentation (ie not the last week of class)… How it works: teacher calls out: who wants to do week 1? No one raises hand… Then someone volunteers… Ok, keeps going… then… who wants to do week 4? Half the class jumps off the chair raising their hand and eventually someone is persistent enough or sweet-talks the professor into giving it to him. It’s an awful, very aggressive process. All in all, I’m decently happy with the dates of my exposés. I already saw this coming because this also happened last semester (and I lost the exposé battle in all of my classes last semester), so I came prepared this time.
I am taking also a tennis course again—this semester I signed up for a class that takes place in a covered court, thankfully! It snowed quite a bit in Paris two weeks ago, just before classes started. It was very cold (although probably not compared to Chicago) so it was nice to be able to play inside. I’m also the only exchange student in my tennis class (out of about 8 people), and it is very obvious that I’m a foreigner… especially because I’m not very familiar with the tennis terms, and the coach usually yells something really fast like “Alright go run two laps!” and all of the French students start sprinting and I just stand there for a few seconds, then I do whatever the others do… but I will get used to this and hopefully expand my vocabulary!