Studying Abroad: Virumaa College

For ending our degree in Mechanic Enginering, we had to make an Internship. Ten weeks in France, or twelve abroad. We choose to make it abroad, it was for us much more interesting, for learning foreign language, and also to open our mind to other place and people.

We asked our professor for making this time abroad. He help us and gave us different choice for going abroad. Estonia, Poland, Spain and Italy.

We choose Estonia first. It was a kind of exotic country, and more we searched information about Estonia on Internet, more it seemed to be a very interesting country. We gave our response to our professor. He tell us that the school was not in the capital, Tallinn, but in a little city.

At the beginning, we were a bit afraid to stay in a little city, but as soon as we visited our Estonian school, the Virumaa Kolledz, and met teachers and student from there, we were very happy.

We realised the subject of our study in mechanical enginering (vibration in bearings). This task was very interesting, doing it with professor from the VK, asking them how to do, how to calculate better, it was for us very interesting. Our task was a participation in international project between Tallinn University of Tecnology and the Saint-Petersburg University of Technology, which are two well-known technical centers of North Europa.

We got lot of liberty in our research, which permits to search, find, read and understand mathematics books (in english) of the VK and publication on our subject.

Now we have finished the three months of study, we can draw ideas :

This time in the VK was very pleasant. More than time for science, we get a really interesting time with student, professor, etc. We also could improve our English as well as speak about European Union, different way of teaching in Estonia and France, make presentation about the French engineering school system. The association for Erasmus of University of Tallinn gave us the possibility to discover a big part of Estonia.

Being in Ida-Virumaa has not been an cap for us, on the contrary, in this little city, people are very friendly, help us for discovering the country, find some place to visit, to have fun. The fact to be in Kohtla-Jarve was very good to meet all kind of people, to be deeply taken into « the Estonian way of life », maybe more as if we were in Tallinn.

For all this reasons, we encourage people to spend a semester in the Virumaa Kolledz, which provides us a very good environment of studying and student life.