Year abroad choices, the ones I made and what I'd do differently. My summary of studying in Brussels and Granada.

Having come to the end of my classes once and for all here in Granada and so being just a matter of weeks from the end of my YA once and for allI think I am now in a good position to be able to write this blog about studying on the year abroad.  The study/work placement/language assistant debate is one that every languages student goes through when making their plans for the year abroad, and everyone has their own reasons for the decisions they make.  I personally didn't want to be a language assistant as I really wanted to split my year between the two countries without having to spend my summers away if I didn't want to.  Also, as a French intensive student my French tutor advised me that teaching would not be the best way to improve my French and strongly recommended that I studied.  I think she was right with her suggestion as the language assistants spend most of their time in school pretending they only speak English, meaning they have to find other ways of getting out and practising, which of course is fine for some people, but for those like me that as I said on a previous blog seem to have regressed into their shells somewhat this year it probably isn't ideal.  The other choice was to find a work placement, but I decided I didn't want to do this and was told repeatedly that placements in both countries would be very hard to come across anyway.  So the decision was made that I would study.

When it comes to French we had Brussels, Geneva, Lyon, Rennes, Poitiers or Montpellier, the first two are specialist translation schools which appealed to me and so I opted for Brussels.  Let's talk about that decision first, the main thing I'd not really considered when it came to Brussels was how international it is.  I'd considered the bilingualism with Dutch but did my research and found that French was the dominant language in the city anyway. What I guess hadn't occurred to me was that with the presence of so many international organisations everyone spoke English, it didn't matter if you spoke to them in French because 7 times out of 10 they'd reply to you in English, usually thinking they were being helpful not knowing they were being quite the opposite.  The other thing with ISTI was that because of the size of the school in comparison to the amount of Erasmus students they took on I found that I was in a lot of classes with just Erasmus students and it was very hard to integrate with the Belgian students and get any language practise.  I signed up for a tandem programme and met up once a week with a Belgian girl where we would speak for the first half in French and then in English, but in honesty this probably was no where near enough.

As far as Lancaster is concerned we don't have a huge amount of choice when it comes to where we can study for Spanish.  We can go to Mexico, Bilbao, Granada, Girona and Lleida.  So, that leaves you with the choice of going thousands of miles away, to two Catalan speaking Unis, to the Basque country where you may be faced with a second language as well or Granada.  I toyed with the idea of Bilbao but settled on Granada in the end.  My concern about Granada was that it is known as a really big party city because of the amount of Erasmus students and that isn't really my thing, but this hasn't really been a problem, I've found it's been easy enough just to do what I want instead.  Although there are lots of Erasmus students in Granada there is also a huge amount of Spanish students so I wasn't ever in classes with just foreign students.  You do however have a totally free choice of what you take and there isn't really any guidance on what is too hard for Erasmus students so I have found that two of the courses I've taken haven't really been suitable and I'm sure that is going to show in my exam results- it's a good job that they don't really matter!

Studying does have its pros and cons.  The good thing is that even if you're not speaking the language as much as you'd like you are hearing it, taking classes in it and writing in it all the time which has to be good practise.  It also keeps you busy, for me I need to keep doing things so I don't feel too homesick, so having a good amount of contact hours and work to do outside of that time kept me going and it wouldn't if I'd been teaching for instance.  The cons obviously are having to take exams, not really knowing what courses to take and the difficulty of integrating with native speakers.  It is also worth considering your unis rules on exams, as far as Lancaster is concerned we have to take them and the marks count towards our grade for the year, but we don't have to pass them, this works in two ways.  It is first and foremost a really good thing because there is no need to panic and stress about the exams, what happens, happens!  The problem with this is that my motivation to revise is pretty scarce so I find myself half heartedly revising and just wishing away the hours until they are over, possibly not the way I should be spending my final weeks here, but that's how it is!

Sometimes I do wish I'd worked, it would have given me a different experience for the year and I might have felt like I'd achieved more, but the issue with that for me is that I'd potentially be totally alone and unsure of how to meet people, especially other students because it is important to have that sort of "homely" contact from time to time.  I did however work for 6 weeks last summer in Valencia, I met all sorts of people and really enjoyed myself, but the work was boring because there just wasn't much of it so I spent a lot of time doing nothing.  That's the hard thing about picking what to do and where to go, unless you know someone that has done the exact same thing before it is all very much unknown.  I couldn't have spent the whole year, or even 6 months in that job, but it was good for the summer and to give me an experience of working in Spain.

So what am I concluding?  I'm not really sure if I'm honest with you.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing isn't it?  And maybe with it I'd have seriously looked into finding work placements that interested me and would be relevant to what I want to do in the future, but this time last year I didn't know that, and we had to make decisions in the November before we left!  For any future YA students reading this, it is important to remember that YA decisions are all about you, don't feel influenced by what other people are doing, and why they are making that decision, because they're not you!