Don't go to Mons (Belgium)

Do you like going out to party? Do you like living in big cities? Do you enjoy a lively and vibrant atmosphere? Do you like when there's a lot going on? If you answered yes to any of those questions - don't go to Mons.

I'm a student at the University of Portsmouth and I am currently on my year abroad. I've already done the first half at the University of Mons in Belgium. Everyone is always excited to be going on Erasmus and I was too. I imagined it to be an amazing and possibly life changing experience. If only I’d known... I'm going to tell you why you shouldn't go to Mons for your year abroad.

Why did I choose to go to Mons?

The FTI – EII (Faculté de Traduction et d'Interprétation - École d'interprètes internationaux) was supposed to be great and I was told that out of all the options we had to choose from, that was the best place for me to go seeing as becoming a professional translator or interpreter has been my dream since I first discovered those professions. After the first couple of weeks I regretted my choice.

What actually happened?

Up until the last day of lectures I was wondering why Mons has such an amazing reputation regarding its translation and interpreting faculty. For me it was just normal and I didn't see anything special about it. I only did translation in Portsmouth for one semester and it was much more exciting and I definitely learned more there than I did in Belgium. The lecturer in Portsmouth made the lessons much more interesting than the lecturers in Belgium did. Most of the lecturers seemed like they didn't like and care about the Erasmus students in their lessons and just expected us to know everything without any explanation. Some of my friends told me that there was one lecturer who actually said that she doesn’t want any Erasmus students in her class because they don't actually want to learn. Also, another lecturer told us that we're not going pass one of the modules which we had to do if we wanted to take the translation unit. Unfortunately we had no choice and had to stick with it.

In all honestly, everything was going wrong since the first day. We had a welcome meeting where we were told more about the recycling system in Mons instead of important university related information. The meeting lasted about 2 hours and at the end we had no idea when the lectures start or how, when or where we get our timetable. After a few days we found out that we actually have to make our timetables ourselves which was the most frustrating thing I ever had to do. But before we actually got round to doing that, we had to find our coordinator because we had no idea what we were supposed to be doing and everything seemed very complicated. After having been told that nobody has ever heard the name of the lady who was our coordinator and after being sent to a completely wrong department, we finally managed to find her and we finally got some useful information. I hope I never have to go through anything as stressful as having to sort out my own timetable and dealing with Erasmus documents again. We were told that the University of Mons had recently changed their system and the units we were offered before the summer weren't available anymore or we had to do other subject along with them in order to pass. The choice was so limited that we had to start learning another language which in my case was Norwegian. Also, we could only take a second year masters class in interpreting which meant that we didn't learn the basics because they start teaching those in the second semester. The lecturers know that the majority of students come to Mons in the first semester and most of them come for the translation and interpreting yet instead of wanting to sell things to us, it felt like they were doing everything to push us away and lose links with their partner universities which I know has happened a lot in recent years. All the changes in their system meant that we had to fill out our documents again and make significant changes to them which took a long time to be accepted and signed in order to be sent off.

What’s the town like?

Mons is a small town - it has about 90000 inhabitants. It is small and nothing really happens there. Oh sorry, maybe apart from the Christmas markets and the ice rink in December. But apart from that, it's pretty lame and boring there. There's the Marché aux Herbes where the main student nightlife is supposed to take place but if you go there during the week - it's dead. It picks up a little bit at weekends but in general, it's nothing special. There were a few parties and events organised but it felt like they tried to bite off more than they could chew. They made the events on Facebook and kept announcing them as the best events of the year but when we actually got to the party, they were pretty crap. The music wasn't great and the evenings looked totally different than what was said in the description on Facebook.

What’s the student life like?

I think that the main reason why the student life isn't good in Mons is because the majority of Belgian students goes to university in their hometown or close to home. Most of them go back home at weekends or have friends who they grew up with and have already known which means that they already have their groups of friends. This makes it hard for an outsider because they're not very open for new friends and they prefer being around their own friends. They're not very keen on helping Erasmus students either which was quite upsetting because we were there to learn and most of them will probably be in the same situation as us at some point of their degree. They will have to go on a year abroad to a different country and have to face many problems with which they would probably be happy to receive a bit of help or advice. Also, Belgian students are very stressed because the Belgian education system is very strict and the grading at the university is rather unfair in my opinion. To pass an exam you need 50% which isn't too bad but some lecturers take a mark off for every mistake you make which means you have to have the perfect knowledge of everything and they never know what to expect in the exam. Believe me, some subjects are very hard.

Overall, I completely regret choosing mons as my year abroad destination because it was nothing what i expected it to be. The only thing I can think of is that the train tickets are cheap which allows you to visit other places in the country without spending too much money. Oh, and another good thing about the location of mons was that it was only a 4 hour journey to my family in Germany so I could escape from that depressing place whenever I wanted.