"They'll teach you how to study here." Vera Koliverda — about the unique experience of studying at the School of Digital Innovation in Paris.

Vera Koliverda, a third-year student of the bachelor's program "Business Informatics", shares her expirience as an exchange student at the private university EPITECH in Paris, which has been producing IT specialists for more than 20 years and is considered a respected school of digital technology expertise. This experience for Vera has become very unusual — a complete immersion in the system of project training with a curator, without lectures and seminars.

Hello! My name is Vera Koliverda. I spent one autumn semester of my third year of Business Informatics bachelor in HSE studying at the University of EPITECH in Paris, France. I would like to share my experience with those who consider this special university for an exchange program.

In general, I gained a lot of skills from this experience: I improved my French and English, my soft and hard skills. Also I traveled a lot. And I achieved my goals.  

Talking about the university itself, I would say that EPITECH is very different from HSE and GSB in particular. First of all, EPITECH is not a business school, it is called “Paris Graduate School of Digital Innovation”. That means that major subjects available for international students are programming courses. If it is not your major field of interest, this university is not the best option for you. 

Studying in EPITECH is based on a project based learning approach. That means that there is no fixed schedule with lectures and seminars. There are only “kickoffs” which are basically short presentations of a new project, follow-ups and reviews. Subjects contain several projects. All projects that I had were about C programming. This widened my horizons in coding and helped me during my internship interview. 

In a long term perspective, I would say that I have significantly improved both my hard and soft skills and achieved my goals.