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Student abroad

Last week, a fourth year student on an exchange program with the University of Chicago came to talk to me on her winter break in Paris. She had a few questions about her choices of program for the next year but she mostly wanted to share about her experience. The math courses she took in Chicago are mostly postgraduate and PhD courses, and she has had a hard time assimilating them but she nonetheless passed all her first trimester courses and she now intends to start a PhD in mathematical modelling. By going to the US, she has also discovered the virtues of personal and group work, which is somehow lost on our students due to a large load of course hours per week… I was glad to see this plan towards a math PhD unravelling, as so few of our students end up doing research, but I was also reflecting that this exchange student would have been less likely to do so, had she stayed in France, not because of the contents of the courses but because the large number of students in our courses (up to 180 in fourth year!) prohibits personal tutoring and advising… I am also quite sorry the exchange program we had with the University of Chicago has now come to an end, as the single student we sent there every year was always successful and pursued brilliant postgraduate studies.