I could rant about the University and, in particular, the politics department all day long. I’ll keep it brief, though. For context, I am an international master’s student studying European and Global Studies which is a course run by the Department of Political Science. This department is massively dysfunctional and could not organise a p***-up in a brewery. While this may sound like something that, as a master’s student living abroad in Italy, could be ignored for the benefits of living in Italy generally, it is completely soul-sucking. No one on my course has enjoyed themselves.

Some examples of the poor quality of education: exams are often taken orally in front of the rest of the course, meaning that answers can often be gleaned from classmates beforehand; marks are 90% of the time given arbitrarily with no feedback. Same quality of answer from two students will often not have same result – either bc favouritism or something more nefarious. I have also never had a well-organised exam i.e. on time or with enough space in the room for the students. late exams have ranged from 30 mins to about 3 hours. Maybe this is normal for Italy or specific to the department, I don’t know, but it is such a waste of time and shows how little they value the student.

The quality of the teaching is also disappointing. It is generally slow and read from the slide. Moreover, I am on an English-language course and I can safely say only about 50% of the professors have had an above B2 level of English. One of them had to read from a prepared script to even teach the lesson. Native speakers such as myself are at a massive advantage too – it often feels during the oral exams that merely speaking at the teachers fluently and quickly is enough to score high grades. I’m not joking, I scored a 30 cum laurea by just speaking quickly.

Finally, the way they ask for theses to be written here makes 0 sense. They ask for a 50,000-word piece, which is a stupidly massive article. The professors are at least open about the fact they will never read these, which is incredibly demoralising and makes your work feel worthless. This is a common theme with much smaller 3,000-word essays too. How on Earth can they expect to mark these if they will never read them? From a small 10-minute presentation on graduation day, apparently. Again, their grading feels so baseless and arbitrary .

There’s loads of other examples I could use too. They need to sort themselves out.

My experience with UNIPD is certainly positive. The Faculty of Political Sciences provides highly relevant and excellent quality study plans. However, some organizational aspects (lesson times, reception of teachers, organization of some exams) need to be improved.

I recommend this University. The course of International Politics are very interesting, you can have the possibility to attend Erasmus periodo, traineeship and othet International activities. The classrooms are not very good and modern but at the same time, the masterclasses are not that crowded so Little classes are ok. Due to usually the master class are little, professors can follow you easily.

University among the most prestigious in Italy, highly trained teachers and excellent facilities. Wide variety of study rooms, libraries containing all the necessary texts and beyond, university sports field and good organization.