The end of the year came sooner than I expected. I am back in France for the summer but I am missing Ireland and the wonderful public system.

Exam time was not a tough time for me. I think after three years studying I started to be used to the way of working. I spent most of my time in a nice and wonderful café in Dawson Street. I don’t work well in the library because there are so many people I know there and you are not supposed to talk, eat or drink anything other than water.

After the end of the 2nd semester, called Hilary term, we had two weeks off in theory to study for your exams. I said in theory because I didn’t. I am still wondering why so many people ran to the library at that time. I did not really step into the library during the whole exam period. I even spent a day in Armagh for a birthday present. The weather was very nice and it was very hard to be focused on exam study. But lucky me! As I said, when you start to know your topic you know the trick for being efficient. I think the fact that one of my subjects was the French revolution helped me a lot as my grandfather was so passionate about it. I have two pieces of advice for future Erasmus students. When your home advisor tells you that you’ve picked too many classes and you should drop some as it may cause trouble at the end of the year – do it! The second one is more for history students; Irish history is wonderful but don’t choose too many classes in Irish history, even if you don’t have a lot of other choice. I was a bit disappointed about that as most of the classes were Irish, British, American or French history. Concerning the exam, I was a bit surprised, as in France we don’t really have a choice of exam questions. Here you have a lot of choice and you have to answer more than one question, usually only two or three questions, as the exams are so short.

When I first started studying I had six hours exams, so that was a change. I think I managed well. I hope so at least! The exam procedure was a bit surprising as well. There are just a few rooms, the best one of course being the exam hall. Writing your paper while you are looking at Queen Elizabeth I is very classy! Some other are less impressive and stink a bit. My second surprise was that we had tables. In France we have tables in all our classrooms in college. I was very surprised that most of the classrooms in Trinity didn’t and was worrying about that for the exam. But apparently they found some hidden table somewhere! So the exam is in an exam room with a lot of people, not only from your class as some class can be very small (there were only two of us in my Medieval Irish history class, for example). There are invigilators in charge of the process. They are wearing a formal black dress at the beginning. Bit by bit you will see them taking those clothes off. But they are wearing something underneath so they are not getting naked during the exam! I don’t have that much to say about exams. As I said, I spent most of my time in café drink a good tea (Italian almond tea is my favourite) and attending movie nights and leaving parties. The sun did not help! I will try to write soon about my life post-Erasmus but life back in France is not that easy.