I studied in this university for my Erasmus+ exchange and was very surprised by how massive it was and the number of different choices I had. Even though there’s no central campus (faculties are mostly spread throughout the city), the faculty I studied at (philosophy) was very big and had a lot of services nearby: residences, offices, libraries, canteens and so on.
The experience was great overall. I had the opportunity to learn new systems of education and different teaching methods. Besides, I got to know local people who helped me to adapt to this new university and were willing to explain whatever I needed.
However, I found out two main difficulties for international students. The first one was, of course, bureaucracy. I wouldn’t say this is an endemic problem of this university, but I consider that even teachers were quite badly informed about how they had to treat international students. For instance, they didn’t know if we had to do the same exams than local students or if we had the same criteria for the papers and exams we had to do. The second problem goes under the same fashion: it was quite hard to reach the level of teachers expected from international students. All the exams were done entirely in French and under the exact same conditions than international students. This means that I was meant to do an exam in a foreign language and reach the same level than local students who had been practising that system for years. I think they should care more for the difficulty of trying to express your ideas in a foreign language.