Education - UCL
One particularity of the Efrei London program is to invite students to discover an other culture by living several month in an unknown background, by working but also studying like English students. It is why we had 1 day of classes per week at the University College of London.
In this section, I can give you any advices and tips contrary to the other. However, I will try to share my feelings about differences between the French and the British system.
The university
You can see here the cruciform building, one of the main buildings of the University College of London. As you can see in the wikipedia page for UCL, this university is composed of 32 buildings all over London ! Consequently, the first thing you think when you see the map of UCL is "It is so huge!".
I visited three of all theses building in order to follow my classes. I felt to be a part of a great machine. All seemed to be well-controlled. I'm sure that these feelings came from an efficient organization of all the staff.
Students do not come in UCL only to hear their teachers, they can also use the big computer network strewn all over London. By evening and nights, they can also go to Student Unions beer where they can drink the cheapest beer of London...
The city is in the university and the university is in the city, both are in a perfect symbiosis. This impressed me a lot.
The classes
You will have three modules in UCL during you trip and all the classes will be grouped in a single day a week. This is a disadvantage to find a job but it is a great part of this experience.
English class
All UCL Day morning began with a three hour English class. It was the best language class I ever had. Indeed, we were in small groups (between 8 and 12 depending on absent people) and all was based on conversation. It was great for me because unfortunately, I had not to speak a lot in English at work.
Mathematics class
At the beginning of the afternoon, we followed a mathematics class with a French teacher with an high level in English, but with knowledge in the French education system. I think it was hard to do our best in this class because it required homework every weeks to understand and a lot of work before the final exam. It is not impossible, but in 3 months, we have not enough time to discover all treasures of London and I find this more important than a mathematics class.
Cisco module
To conclude the day, we had to validate each week one lesson on a Cisco certification program on internet. To do that, we were able to use UCL cluster rooms or from everywhere else during 24 hours.
Fortunately, if we missed an exam one day, we can do it the week after.