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Writer's pictureJacob Graham

Tips for Exchange Students

Updated: Nov 12, 2022

If you are a student at UH Manoa or a student from Hawaii and are planning to study abroad in Rennes or even France, some of these tips are worth considering. If you have already read some of my other blogs, certain points will be repeated, but this is because they are incredibly important to consider.


1. START PLANNING EARLY


This includes housing, transportation, paperwork for your home university and exchange university, as well as travel documents (i.e., visa). Planning also involves basic research into your destination country, as there may be specific entry requirements when traveling. Although construction has proceeded at a breakneck pace in Rennes (in my two months here I've seen two large apartments pop up near where I live), there is still fierce competition for housing (especially student housing). This is especially exacerbated by the massive number of students (68,000 according to my professors) returning to Rennes this year for school after a few years of COVID. Getting housing in September or even August will be almost impossible if you don't know someone or have someone benevolent take you in. I secured housing in May, and that was enough to find good housing close to the school. To scare you a bit, I knew more than one person who ended up homeless (they are fine now, a few students took them in). It was really disconcerting to read in the international student group chat about someone who is struggling and on the street, so please take your housing search seriously.


2. Talk to your classmates


This may seem obvious, but I find that your experience becomes much more enriching when you talk to your classmates, both French and international. They often have very different perspectives on things that you had never considered, and the dialogue that you have will (hopefully) leave you feeling immensely satisfied. Much like locals value "talk story", Rennes School of Business (RSB) facilitates deeper conversations, as breaks between classes are plenty and lunch breaks, in particular, are around 2 hours. People in general also tend to enjoy talking about themselves or their country, even if they don't want to openly admit it, and so they can provide a lot of details and "insider" cultural insight that you won't find in the numerous blogs online (ha!). I took the opportunity to eat lunch with my classmates, or my apartment neighbors when I saw them at school. Rennes School of Business is very international so you have people from every continent.


3. Take advantage of your free time and have fun


Since the coursework I am taking is considered in France a 1st/2nd-year master's equivalent, the work can be substantive at times. Nevertheless, there are considerable breaks around certain holidays such as All Saint's Day which you should take advantage of and explore the city or surrounding attractions. Studies are important, but you are also in a new environment that you may never visit again in your lifetime. Make the most of it!


4. Consider cultural context


This was a topic that I noticed was brought up a lot among international students. For example, French people are very straightforward and will tell you if they think something is bad. One of my Chinese classmates, Kun, highlighted how this was a distinction between high and low-context cultures, where high-context cultures tend to be more implicit with their meaning whereas low-context cultures tend to be more explicit with their meaning. This concept was reinforced by what I was learning in Managing International Complexity. He said that Chinese people would find the forwardness of French people really rude, and had to remind some other Chinese students of the cultural context because in French culture it is seen as a more polite thing to be completely direct and open about your feelings. For people from Hawaii, who I generally find to be more high-context than people from the mainland US, this can be hard to adapt to at first. Some of my Eastern European classmates also found French people to be quite honest and direct, compared to their culture and so we discussed the cultural contexts of France relative to our cultures as well.


5. Prepare for some disorganization (and set some expectations)

This tip is more school-specific but worth mentioning.


The general disorganization, especially when it came to scheduling at Rennes School of Business (RSB) was notable. Quite a few of my international classmates got upset over this issue, and some of my professors openly expressed their distaste/concern for the disorganization of the scheduling. Class schedules change a lot (and continue to change). For example, classes might be rearranged the day before or the day of the class. Also, the classrooms that you meet in are usually different every time. I think that some of these issues are perhaps systems based. RSB does a lot of manual scheduling. In other words, classes aren't set in advance before the semester, and they change every week. As a result, students cannot be entirely sure of when they will need to go to class sometimes.


Here is an example of my classes this week:


And next week:


Pretty different right?


This manual form of scheduling might have been acceptable when RSB was new and growing, but today RSB numbers over 5000 students. Indeed, if you review their enrollment numbers, the number of students attending the school has been growing every year, and managing all of those individual schedules is a monumental task. Therefore I believe that they have outgrown their current scheduling system. I partially anticipated this and didn't let it bother me as much because I was told by some French people before I left to expect some disorganization and inefficiency when dealing with organizations and institutions, and one of my French classmates even made a joke about "French organization" in class.


Of course, this does not mean that every single organization or institution as a whole is like this, nor does it mean that you should accept this, or that my classmates' and professors' anger/annoyance are invalid (I think that they are very much valid). What you should do is anticipate these situations. I found that people who cannot anticipate these situations have a really hard time.


6. Don't overthink things


Students preparing to study abroad often run through a lot of what-if scenarios in their heads. I was one of those students. It is ok to be cognizant of what could go wrong, but overthinking things can cause a lot of unnecessary stress. If something doesn't work out, then no problem. Maybe you wanted to visit a museum but it was closed for the day. Or maybe you wanted to eat outside a café but it started storming. One thing that I learned from Scouting is that even if experiences aren't "perfect" they can still be memorable, which I think is what matters the most.


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