Dearest reader!
I did my exchange studies during spring 2024 at Belgium Flanders side at Oostende & Brugge. My exchange studies took roughly from February until June.
In Finland I study at building services engineering, electrical systems degree. In the end, I ended up in the construction engineering line for exchange in Belgium even I chose the electrical engineering exchange program, which was interesting. I decided to let the situation take me along and developed a new interest in construction technology engineering.
School and studies at Vives University Applied Science were a bit psychologically heavy. Because the construction campus has somewhat difficult conditions with the English language. Which is why I didn’t really have a choice in courses and not very many of them either.
I had five courses which were of different lengths and started at different times. One of them was Revit application drawing technic second course where teacher taught to whole class in Dutch and repeat it for us two exchange students in English, we probably had eight lessons on this one.
In addition, I have an international construction challenge, a practice project work course that lasted a week and was only in April. What made the course international was that students from the Netherlands arrived in Belgium, but unfortunately the course was not designed to be in English because the project assignments, every student and teacher, spoke Dutch. In small groups we speak English, and my group mates try their best to give me something to do in the practice project, but I really feel like I just made their project work more difficult by my presence.
From more comfortable courses, I had online course about strong sustainability. It was an independent online course. Materials at platform was in Dutch, but I was already use to for that, so I just used Mozilla’s extension that translates the website into different languages, and I answered into the question boxes in English.
Also, I had global sustainability and engagement course, which was implemented on the Brugge campus, with other exchange students in English! Theme wasn’t my thing, but the atmosphere still made this one my favorite. The course had about seven lessons and assignments were done between lessons.
About interesting course, I will introduce for you real life project course, which was for us two exchange students at construction degree. It was leaded by two project leaders. In the project we implemented apartments Bim model drawings at Revit application by using Point Cloud 3D scans. We held meetings about every two weeks.
Compared to Finnish education, the number of lessons and the method of implementation were freer. But I classify this more to the fact that engineering students are not taught English at construction campus, which is why there are no construction theory courses in English.
Since I had a lot of free time due to the scarcity of hours, I looked, studied and tried different things. Traveling and moving around by train was easy, and I think renting a bike was the best decision I made during my exchange. The land was so flat that closer to summer I cycled in the seaside town of Ostend until midnight, stopping to take photos and write down thoughts in a notebook.
We traveled by train with my two exchange girlfriends, we visited Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp, among others by buying a 10-way ticket twice on the NMBS train app. I also made a trip to Kortrijk, Dinant and Lille in France. We went to a few museums and breweries, and every time we were out, we ate delicious food at a new place, Belgian fries, and a waffle for dessert in each town. We bought pralines for the next day of our trip and spending the rest of the evening quality time with each other at the bar with a new beer taste in the right hand. Okay, maybe we didn’t do the exact same steps every time, but you get the point!
Explore and be ready have fun, be yourself, meet people and be open minded for everything around you, even if something went wrong. Happy exchange experience for you!
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