1. Studying is a lot more flexible than working.

Pau, France - studenty, sunny, Erasmus, adventurous

I studied in Pau on my first half of the year abroad and found it really easy to make friends with French and fellow Erasmus students at the university, as it's quite a small uni. Everyone ends up knowing each other, which is great, as you don't feel that overwhelmed by the social side of things! Erasmus students also organised loads of activities, and most of them were free; you can't really beat white-water rafting in our first week!! The location's also brilliant as you can get to Spain really easily, as Pau's quite a bit down South. I lived in dorms (Gaston Phoebus), which was good as I made friends easily, but I also got an amazing view of the Pyrenees from my bedroom window. Not so cool were the rules about the place - no noise past 11PM and we weren't allowed to drink in the kitchen...

I always knew Erasmus was going to be mad. But I didn’t quite expect the events of the last few weeks. After the initial stress of moving all my stuff over and realising I had in fact forgotten the last two years of Italian teaching at Bath and was now back to “errr, posso errr avere una *shit what’s the word for stamp* por favour”. Nevertheless I grew some balls, got sorted at uni with an exciting time table of French theatre and Italian journalism and started to really get stuck in. It was when my Italian lecturer added me as a friend on Facebook that I first knew things were going to be a bit different here. Since then we’ve had transport strikes, power cuts, successions of praying Italians chanting down our street and of course have been beeped at walking down the street by anything from policemen to bus drivers.

If enriching your mind with facts and figures in a foreign land seems like the right choice for you, have a look through our Study Abroad section. Take a peek at the international league table, read through our case studies and find out what's it's like once you're out there! We've even got some info on unis abroad (Erasmus-ing it up or going further afield), what you should take with you, brushing up our your language skills and much, much more! And don't forget to visit our shop to get the latest gadgets and gizmos for your time away!