European Studies in TCD?

I'm a second year European Studies student doing French and Spanish. Ling and Stary Eyed have more or less summed it up but a few things have actually changed since Ling was in first year.

I for one, think the French department is disappointing.

For French in first year, you will only have one lecture - grammar. If you're going for an A1 in the leaving cert you will no doubt find this lecture series rather tedious, certainly for the first half of the year anyway. There is no real Contemporary France course for European Studies students. You will also have three tutorials. One is for oral/aural French, where you are expected to watch videos and listen to tapes on a number of different themes and then discuss them in class. The tapes are hopelessly outdated and badly organised. Many don't even have the pieces you're meant to listen to on them. The other tutorials are a mix of textual analysis, essay writing and Introduction to Contemporary France all rolled into one cumbersome package. Basically you read texts on French society and analyse the grammar within them. I'm not going to lie - it's not very engaging. This year I only have three hours of French, with one less tutorial. I think this is inadequate.

The Spanish department on the other hand have been excellent. I started as a beginner last year and found the experience of learning a new language with them to be very pleasant. With an A1 or anything near that in leaving cert Spanish you should have no problems during first year. Because I was a beginner last year I had a slightly different timetable to the non beginners with two hours more than them. You should have more or less one oral class, one Introduction to Modern Spain lecture, two textual analysis tutorials and two grammar tutorials. From my experience, I found this set up much better than that of the French department.

Stary Eyed is right, you won't be doing any literature in French or Spanish as a European Studies student. To be honest, this doesn't really bother me that much. You still get to work on a lot of the stuff that makes learning a language enjoyable without this.

I found the history section of the course to be one of the easier and more interesting modules in European Studies. You'll have two lectures and one tutorial per week. In the tuturials you read and analyse documents relating to the course. You'll also have to research and write an essay during the year. It sounds quite intimidating but you do get a lot of direction from the department. In second year, everyone takes a compulsory history course and you also have the choice to take a second one instead of a social science if you want. I went for the second history course myself. It's great.

Social Science has also changed. The course lasts the whole year and is divided into three parts - sociology, politics and economics. In sociology you do a module called European Societies or some such. It's a nice introduction into sociology as a subject and to Europe in general. In politics the module focussed totally on the European Union and the way it works. In economics you are just introduced to some of the very basic concepts involved. You'll have to write an essay for each of the three modules during the year. You can chose to do one of a number of different social science modules in second year if you want - International Relations, European Sociology, Comparative Politics and Intermediate Economics. I decided no to. I went with history instead. But that's just my personal taste.

I don't know if I've made the course sound particularly attractive but I really do enjoy it. The course is quite small so you get to know people really well too. We have a pretty tight group. You do mix with the TSM language students in some classes as well, which is another plus.

Don't worry about asking questions. I had similar problems finding out about the course back in the day. Ask anything you want here now or send me a PM later on in the year if you're wondering about anything.