We arrived in Nicosia around 5 weeks ago and the time flies way too fast. We are visiting the European University of Cyprus (EUC) during our semester abroad and it is just like going to university while being on a very long vacation.
The whole university is surrounded by palm trees and the temperature is around 28 degrees every day.
The EUC is one of only 19 university’s in Cyprus. The university’s main focus is on medicine as well as Business. But there are other faculties too. The students here are in general very international – we have students from Simbabwe, Belgium, Nigeria, Australia and China in our classes. In general we are really happy that our courses are completely mixed between Cypriots and international students because that makes it much easier to meet new people (and not only germans). Unfortunately there are only two of us from the Macromedia here. I hope this number will change over the next semesters because it is truly an amazing country and its worth coming here! I guess Cyprus is just not in anyones mind when thinking of a semester abroad – but it should definitely be 🙂
The university is handling the covid situation very well too and all classes are taught on campus as well as online. So in case someone doesn’t feel comfortable with coming they can livestream the session online. In general we are around 30 – 40 people in one class and around 80% will attend on campus. A difference to the Macromedia University is that there is mandatory attendance. The teachers will ask for the attendance before every session and it makes 10% of our grade at the end of the semester. The note system here is different. Even though we have an exam at the end, we also have midterm exams as well as assignments during the semester. The classes are usually taught with Power Point presentation made by the teacher – very similar to the Macromedia. We use the platform „Blackboard“ and for our materials a very similar one to our „Moodle“ system.
One thing you have to be aware of is that Cypriots like to start their day slow and that means classes usually start around 3 or 6 pm and will end around 9 pm sometimes. In the beginning that was something we had to get used to but now we can’t imagine going to class in the morning anymore. We already learned to start our days later – like a real Cypriot 🙂
I am excited to share more of my experience outside the university with you in the following weeks and hope you like the first impressions of the European University of Cyprus.
Antio sas!
