ERASMUS experience report

Hochschule Niederrhein – International Marketing (double degree French/German)

I took part in the ERASMUS programme as part of my studies in the Master´s programme at Hochschule Niederrhein. The semester abroad that I spent in Colmar, France, is part of the programme „International Marketing“, a double degree Master´s programme in French and German and had to be done by all students. The receiving school was the „Université de Haute Alsace“. I had my classes at the Faculty of marketing and agrosciences „Faculté de Marketing et d´Agrosciences“. I started my semester abroad in September 2021, arriving in Colmar with two of my fellow students with whom I shared a flat.

The course that I chose for this semester was called MEIP (Marketing études et innovation produit) and I had the major subject Marketing des produits agroalimentaires (Marketing of edible/food products).

ERASMUS programme:

I didn't benefit much from the Erasmus program itself, except for the financial support. I don't know if that was due to me, because I didn't really ask for a contact or anything else. However, I did not receive any contact person or anything else on the part of Erasmus, which I had actually expected. What I did like was the language test and the opportunity to improve your language skills online, not to mention the financial support, since as a German you are used to somewhat lower living costs.

Because that's all I can say about the Erasmus program and the organization, my report will focus more on Colmar and the study program.

Classes:

Even though we did not expect it at the beginning due to the high incidences in France, the lectures or classes took place on site at the faculty. We only had to wear masks in the premises of the campus.

What I found good was that we exchange students (in my course we were 3 Germans) were integrated quite normally into the courses and we were evaluated like the French, but in presentations and written submissions linguistic "errors" were not included in the evaluation and the lecturers were all open to support us in ( professional and linguistic). All courses, except for two, were in French, which was absolutely no problem, as you got into the subject matter super quickly and you didn't have to be afraid to ask questions.

At the university there is also a contact person who is responsible for the exchange programs, but here the boundaries of responsibility between exchange programs and course organization become blurred, which is why it was sometimes difficult to find out who you could now get an answer to your question from.

Regarding the courses, I can say that there are different blocks or modules, which differ from each other in content and focus. Nevertheless, it happened that one thought that the course contents within the modules were not particularly well coordinated, since some contents were duplicated, of which the responsible lecturers knew nothing. (eg. project about design thinking in two different classes)

In addition, the level of some courses was not particularly high in my opinion, such as the English classes, which were incredibly unchallenging for me. For a master's program, the level has been very low. I was also really looking forward to a course that was organized externally - a course for the Adobe programs InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, which I thought was great in itself, but here, too, they didn't ask in advance what level the course was at all, which meant that the level was ultimately too low for the entire class, which is really a pity when you already get the opportunity.

The exams were quite nice, I must say. They were well distributed over the semester and varied. Some were creative projects and lectures, some were homework and we only had a few exams. However, the workload in some courses was very high, and there were a lot of individual exams, whereas for some courses (some of which were a full day of block classes) there was no exam at all. These courses ultimately took away some time. (Even if it is nice to not have an exam in a class)

The city - Colmar

Colmar is a cute place and the surrounding towns are also very nice. Due to the fact that I was there mainly in the winter months, the wine landscape was a bit dull. The Christmas markets, however, were all the more beautiful (kitschy). Unfortunately, this has also attracted very, very many weekend tourists, making the city very empty during the week and crowded on weekends. Colmar is really more of a city for weekend getaways, but I wouldn't call it student-friendly. Since my roommates and I didn't have a car or a bike, we were rather inflexible when it came to excursions. However, Strasbourg and Basel can be reached by train and are nice destinations for a daytrip.