Testimonial 17: MSc in Mech Eng – Energetics and Propulsion at Centrale Nantes #2

Personal Experiences during the Course

• I started my course in September 2019. My Master was supposed to be 2 years but due to Covid, I had some personal issues and had to do 1 year extra in order to validate my degree.
• The professors are well experienced and most of them are Research assistants and Researchers.
• My course was mostly theory-based and not very Practical/Laboratory oriented. So, many of my colleagues got PHD opportunities after our master’s.
• I had a good experience with foreign nationalities and they were all friendly and good team players.
• Examinations were challenging and some courses were validated based on presentations and projects.
• I had zero knowledge of French while starting the course in 2019. At first thought that the course conducted in University would be sufficient but it won’t be. It will just give you exposure to culture and basics.
• But to get fluent you may have to invest a lot of time in learning the language (depends on every individual).
• At the end of 2020 September, I was not good in French not even an A1 level.
• When I was in a situation to repeat a year in order to validate my degree I invested all my spare time to learn French.
• I had an opportunity to stay with a French family for a year to help out the kids in that family with English and their homework.
• I also attended classes from AF Madras to improve my level which was in the early mornings for 3 hours (4:30 Am / 5:30 Am based on daylight savings).
• Within 8 months of time I went from 0 to B2 level and started being fluent in French. Then I started investing my time in learning technical stuffs related to my studies in French.
• While I had to repeat an entire year from 2020 September to 2021 August to validate 2 courses that I failed to validate (reason below), I improved my French and that helped me in many situations.
• The reason of me repeating an entire year is completely on me. But I have to give credits to the University for their part as well.
• Until 2019 there was a fees of 250 euros for a student to repeat a year. But during covid, there was a change in fee structure and to repeat a year the student has to pay 4000 euros for a year.
• So until 2019, students who failed to validate 2 or 3 courses had given chances to validate in the next year along with all other courses of the year.
• Due to this new fee regulation, the University changed the rule and because of that almost 15 students (if I remember correctly) for not validating 2 courses were obliged to pay 4000 extra and repeat a year just for 2 courses.
• Again it’s my responsibility to validate all my courses. I don’t want to justify my inability. But it has to be taken into account that this was during peak Covid time and many classes were canceled or conducted online inefficiently).
• A few had to discontinue their studies because of this change in regulations. The worst part is that the university management played politics and betrayed the students by giving false hopes.
• I can explain my accusation. We were made to believe that the University would not implement this rule and would make us study our 2nd year without repeating the first. They said they will conduct a meeting with the director and announce it in this meeting. But this meeting got postponed several times.
• Finally, this meeting was conducted after the deadline to appeal against their decision to make sure we did not appeal against the university. And in this meeting, they said they would stick with their new rule and they’ll implement as many new rules as they want.
• So we were betrayed. The International department head and Masters Director who were supporting the students had resigned (don’t know whether they did voluntarily or forced by management because of supporting students).
• Long story short, It was my inability that I failed to validate two courses, University management played politics for excess money.
• Other than that, it is a good university, the professors are well qualified and I had some good experience studying there but very bad management (always had the worst experience with the Scolarité department as they treat non-French students very badly).