Williams vs Wellesley vs UC Berkeley Dual Degree

AustenNut
Wed, 23 Mar 2022 03:01:02 +0000

In my experience, when a college has a direct relationship with a different university, the course titles and grades transfer over. So my college transcript shows the grades for the year I spent in France at the French universities. And @fiftyfifty1 has mentioned the National Student Exchange several times where students might end up taking courses in Canada or the Caribbean, and I believe those courses/titles transfer just as if they were taken at your home institution. (Please correct me if I’m wrong!) But if someone is enrolling at a different program (with different tuition rates, etc) from their regular university for a year abroad, then perhaps those classes are just marked as pass/fail.

I understand that this Sciences Po classes for this program are in English. But if OP needs to ask where a building is, or figuring out how to make an international call, or wants to order some food without needing to see a picture of it, or take clothes to the dry cleaner or heck, find out how to say dry cleaner and figure out where it might be, or telling the worker at the market how much food she wants, or figuring out how the health screening personnel want you to move, etc. All of that will be in a foreign language. And even though a number of French people speak English, they really don’t like it when people (especially Americans) just start talking to them in English rather than making good-faith efforts to communicate in French.

And speaking of the French, once they warm up to you, they will count you among their lifelong friends. But Americans have a higher level of general friendliness and a much faster timeline for becoming friends (i.e., even for inviting someone to join a group after class). (Of course, many American friendships tend to be much more superficial than those that the French forge.) The people in my program found that it took about 4-5 months for the process to really start happening. And for some people, it never did happen. So imagine leaving home for the first time, trying to figure everything out, not speaking the language well, and you’re lucky if you get more than the most superficial of conversations with a local for months on end.

I can’t tell how many people participate in the Sciences Po program, but I would anticipate that would form the basis for building a social network for OP. There might be 100, 200, 500? Will OP find her kind of people in that group? Maybe. And how many of them will be part of UC-Berkeley and that she will still be in close proximity to after the first two years? Or will she have to restart from scratch again her junior year?

All in all, I just think it’s a really hard way to start college. I think that studying abroad, studying in France, etc, are all wonderful things. I just wouldn’t recommend starting off that way.