Arriving in Madrid, Spain for my semester abroad, I had certain expectations. As I was set to attend a Spanish public university, I was ready to adapt to a different academic structure, a lack of on-campus community and a less engaged and engaging classroom experience. Within the first couple weeks at the university, my assumptions proved correct in most of my courses, and yet the differences seemed to go much deeper. The fact that only half of the students turned up on a good day in some of my classes didn't mean that all Spanish students are lazy, but that some systemic differences almost incentivized a lack of engagement and attendance.
My first experience with any European tertiary education was in Cologne, where the university is a place to take classes and study, acting as an institution of learning within the larger patchwork of the city, rather than a living and community space. Something about the fact that they even had local beers in the cafeteria made the already rather simplified approach to education feel more ingrained into normal society. While maybe not as stark a contrast for those at public university in the United States, coming from a small liberal arts college, this straightforward approach, without the dominance of dorms and on-campus life, was refreshing in some respects. Despite loving my experience at Middlebury, surrounded by friends and a strong community, it can occasionally verge on an academic commune, removed to a large degree from general society. However, in the months I have been studying in Madrid, the observable problems within the classroom seem to arise from a distinct clash between lack of hand-holding and a system without options.
The Spanish university I'm attending, as is the norm with public universities in the U.S., as well, asks students to choose a “grado” (i.e. major) from the start, whether it be Journalism, History or a number of other fields. Unfortunately, the expectation of independence on the part of the student breaks down when the various “grados” have a completely pre-determined course schedule, choosing electives from a short list, with not even an option until the second or third year in many cases. This results in huge portions of students having identical schedules, with rarely any alternatives. While regimented majors are by no means novel in the general American system, the emphasis on memorization in Spanish university, especially within the first couple years, means there is very little engagement in classes some students didn't want to attend in the first place. In classes where the PowerPoints are posted to the class website before the exam, with little elaboration on the slides in class, it was completely normal for between 40 and 45 students to attend out of the 92.
This is by no means the case in all courses, as the third year course I took was a very small, engaging class with high rates of attendance. The general emphasis on memorization and the lack of course choice, however, have, in my experience, created a unique academic atmosphere. A clash between a lack of intervention and a complete dictation of course schedule has created classes that I've felt were more empty than full, with an atmosphere completely alien to my previous academic experience. My time studying abroad has put me in the heart of a huge number of cultural and institutional differences, large and small, but the immediate parallels to my past experience have made my studies at a Spanish university the most striking. Neither inherently negative or positive, these differences between academics during a semester abroad seem to be some of the most intriguing and complex I have come across.
