I attended EPITA, a private engineering school in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, where I studied computer science in an English-taught program. At the time, the tuition was €12,900.
I enrolled at the end of September 2023. In early October, the school organized a camping trip, after which the first semester began. We started with a week-long intensive French course and a French cultural integration class. I really enjoyed this class, as it gave us international students a basic understanding of French culture. After that, the intensive coursework began. Each semester, which lasted two to three months, included around ten courses, making the program very challenging for someone like me with a humanities background.
We had to study not only computer-related subjects but also business, cultural studies, and French—and we had to pass the A2 French exam to graduate. At the end of every course, there was either an exam, a presentation, or a project. After taking the SQL and advanced algorithms exams, I really wanted to give up because they were simply too difficult.
There were three semesters in total. After the first semester, students could switch specializations, and the school would generally approve such requests. When I applied, I chose cybersecurity, but I later felt it was not right for me and that finding a job in the field might be difficult, so I applied to switch to data science. (This proved to be the right choice.) Once our specializations were finalized, we took another two semesters of classes. At the beginning of the third semester, in May, everyone gradually started looking for internships.
The quality of teaching varied, so there were both easy courses and highly demanding ones. A few of the technical courses were interesting, but most were rather dull. Since we were in the international division, the students came from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, though most were from Asia (India, Nepal, China, and so on), Africa (Nigeria, Ethiopia, and so on), and French-speaking countries (Tunisia, Lebanon, and so on).
I really liked this “open-source” engineering culture. People did not keep things to themselves; they shared everything, whether it was technical knowledge or French-learning resources. When I first enrolled, my French was among the weakest in the A2 class. Both in and outside class, classmates would ask whether I needed help, and one classmate even proactively shared his French-learning materials with me.
My classmates were generally younger than me. Everyone was surprised that, despite being 30, I looked about the same age as they did, and some friends asked me how I maintained my youthful appearance. Maybe Asians really do tend to look younger.
It was not easy to find an internship that year. Our classes ended at the end of July, and by January of the following year, roughly one-third of the students in our cohort still had not found an internship.
Many of my classmates were dissatisfied with the school, mainly because it offered little help with finding internships, its administration was slow and disorganized (very French), the school cafeteria was expensive, we were isolated from the rest of the school (we were on the sixth floor by ourselves, while the French students were on other floors, so we had virtually no interaction), and we were not allowed to use the elevators, among other issues. As for me, I had little background in computer science, but I gained skills from this school, and it gave me the opportunity to work in France. I successfully changed careers after just one year, so I still think it was worth it.