2011-03-19, 10:49 PM
In Brazil the better universities are the public ones so there is quite a lot of competition to get into them. You do get all your years for free after.
In Brazil you would normally go to the university in your region so you wouldn't necessarily be moving out from your parents (though it is the case for students who don't live in the capital) so you don't have the same student life experience.
I'd say it's worth it if you have a good university and you are studying something you like. I retained a lot of what I learned in 3.5 years of uni in Brazil and I don't regret it one bit.
In France they have 2 years of no social life with their "préparatoires" where they study like crazy to get into the best "écoles", after that they go into the most prestigious they can't get in (most of the times regardless if it's the area of engineering they want) and the prestige of the "école" goes a long way in telling people hiring you your worth in France.
Écoles have a very VERY nice student life, much different from universities in Brazil since there are much less students (my école here has about 300 people for the 3 years) and after they do their préparatoires they just don't demand as much from their students.
The system forms generally competent people but I feel they have their subjects in way too few classes. There's almost no time in classes to do exercises or to focus on applications, recent news or anything paralel to the course (compared to Brazil anyway).
Note that my vision is biased of course to the universities/écoles I've been to and only to engineering courses.
Finally, I think the university experience was very good for me. It made me feel good about what I like (both in academical terms and others like animes and other weird stuff), people tend to accept you for what you are much more (at least in the geeky environment of engineering) and it led me to grow a lot both as an engineer and as a person.
In Brazil you would normally go to the university in your region so you wouldn't necessarily be moving out from your parents (though it is the case for students who don't live in the capital) so you don't have the same student life experience.
I'd say it's worth it if you have a good university and you are studying something you like. I retained a lot of what I learned in 3.5 years of uni in Brazil and I don't regret it one bit.
In France they have 2 years of no social life with their "préparatoires" where they study like crazy to get into the best "écoles", after that they go into the most prestigious they can't get in (most of the times regardless if it's the area of engineering they want) and the prestige of the "école" goes a long way in telling people hiring you your worth in France.
Écoles have a very VERY nice student life, much different from universities in Brazil since there are much less students (my école here has about 300 people for the 3 years) and after they do their préparatoires they just don't demand as much from their students.
The system forms generally competent people but I feel they have their subjects in way too few classes. There's almost no time in classes to do exercises or to focus on applications, recent news or anything paralel to the course (compared to Brazil anyway).
Note that my vision is biased of course to the universities/écoles I've been to and only to engineering courses.
Finally, I think the university experience was very good for me. It made me feel good about what I like (both in academical terms and others like animes and other weird stuff), people tend to accept you for what you are much more (at least in the geeky environment of engineering) and it led me to grow a lot both as an engineer and as a person.