My first semester on exchange at École polytechnique. Lecturing in English was never a problem — my English was already fine — and, honestly, the biggest thing I took from the whole year had little to do with coursework: this was where I learned to live on my own. I took 16 ECTS.
| Course Name | Teacher | ECTS | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Algorithms for Discrete Mathematics | Lucas GERIN | 3 | A |
| Object-oriented Programming | Gaël THOMAS & Julien TIERNY | 5 | A- |
| Macroeconomics | Mehdi SENOUCI & Gauthier VERMANDEL | 5 | B+ |
| Beginner French | Alexia BRUILLON | 2 | A+ |
| Sports - Year 2 (Climbing) | 1 | A |
Algorithms for Discrete Mathematics
A carefully designed course with little coursework beyond a capstone project, and plenty of class time set aside for it — the project itself just asks you to pull together everything you have learned. It is a solid introduction to NumPy, SymPy, and SciPy. Professor Gerin is sharp, with a dry, applied-mathematician humor that still keeps one foot in the theory — close to my own taste, though I will admit I care even less about proofs and am often happy as long as something works.
Object-oriented Programming
I was surprised that BX students start C++ with this course; at NYCU, Object-Oriented Programming comes after Introduction to Computer Science and already assumes you know C++. Since I had picked up most of the basics in my freshman year under Professor Chen, the material felt familiar. The final project was building a chess bot, Cagnus, and it was the fun part — at one point a teammate had leaned on ChatGPT a little too much and introduced a subtle bug (a sign flip in the minimax, plus mutating the iterator inside a for-loop), which I tracked down. That was the real lesson: ChatGPT existed, but the course still had exams, and you couldn’t simply trust it to write the project for you. I owe a lot to Jetz, a BX student who was pivotal to our result. Starting C++ straight into OOP and pulling it off is genuinely impressive — very much what you would expect from X students.
Macroeconomics
This was my academic low point in France — for a while I genuinely thought I might fail. The lectures and the TD sessions never quite joined up, and in class I only half-followed: a stream of new terms while trying to keep pace. The midterm was brutal — out of 20, the whole class had five points added, so it clearly was not just me — and after that I spent the back half of the semester anxious. Knowing there was a curve helped a little, but not keeping up in class still scared me. Only after the final (which I did not ace either) did I feel safe.
Beginner French
I figured that since I was in France, I might as well learn some French — only to find that “beginner” meant genuinely beginner, and I walked away with nearly full marks. The instructor was lovely and kept the atmosphere very relaxed; the Tuesday afternoon sessions were consistently enjoyable, and the class genuinely bonded.
Sports - Year 2 (Climbing)
I had tried climbing once back in elementary school and remembered liking it; my first session here quickly reminded me how hard it actually is. But it grew on me fast — it is genuinely fun. It was also a good place to practice French, even though the instructor spoke English perfectly well. I picked up the phrase “avoir les bouteilles” (literally “to have the bottles”) — the forearm pump after pushing hard. It really does ache.