Question: What it like working in French then England

Samuel Vennin answered on 15 Jun 2018:

I have only been a student in both countries as I have never worked in France (apart from a 3-day internship when I was 13…). So I can only compare studying in France and England. Higher education is very different in France, more intense, with a bigger workload, more depth in the content and more tests (at least the first two years). Engineering schools are much smaller than universities so the atmosphere is also different: you get to know or interact with everyone in a school of 300 people while obviously you can’t do that when the university has more than 10,000 people… This also mean that we have less societies.
Another big difference is the final objective of your education. Engineering schools train you to become an engineer and apply your knowledge to concrete real world problems, while in universities, you are taught by researchers and it is easier to do research there. That is one of the reason I came to the UK. Having been in universities, I see students benefiting from an exposure to research very early on that I didn’t have. Otherwise, I really love my life in the UK, but I am happy to go back home from time to time 🙂