French students commute between the Hub and The Village
Twenty French IT students work together at the Digital Society Hub. And together they live in container hotel The Village. ‘Zis is notte Paris, monsieur.’
‘If I could have decided myself, I would have gone to Barcelona or Buenos Aires’, he says. But he couldn’t, ISEP had the final say. So now 23-year-old Lucas Jendzio-Verdasca is one of twenty French ISEP students studying for ten weeks at Hanze. ISEP, the Institut supérieur d’électronique de Paris, is one of the grandes écoles, which are private higher education institutions. ‘I’m not rich,’ says Lucas, ‘but my parents… they are able to afford it.’
Stargazing together at night from the Van OlstToren
The ISEP course takes five years and Lucas is almost finished, he just has six months to go. ‘One of the requirements is a stay abroad, which is why I am in Groningen now.’ Their programme at Hanze is especially set up for them. ‘To make them feel a bit at home, we organise social activities’, says Linda Noordhuis, who coordinates the programme. ‘We have been cycling through the province together, for example. We spent an evening professionally stargazing from the roof of the Van OlstToren.’
In the afternoon, the French students can be found at the Digital Society Hub on Zernike Campus, attending lectures and working on projects. The main focus is system modelling and transactional energy systems. ‘My group is working on an application that allows you to optimise the use of renewable energy. It’s a lot of thinking about energy storage and battery charging and discharging. Yes, it’s technical and involves a lot of computer science. That makes sense. After all, we are all computer science students.’
From Peizerweg, you can hardly see The Village, only the recycling station catches the eye
The ISEP students live in the B wing of The Village, a complex of 216 container living spaces on Peizerweg, right opposite Tamoil’s gas station. You kind of have to know where it is. From the street, only the colourful recycling station catches the eye.
The complex itself is half-hidden behind the gym. ‘That is also accessible to non-residents,’ says Lucas. He is the only Frenchman out this early on a chilly 26th of March. ‘If you had come later in the day, you would have seen more people.’
The rooms are not too big, but the price of 550 euros a month is doable
Lucas is right, it’s a quarter past nine, that’s a bit early, of course. Yet every few minutes you can see a student descending the steel stairs. They are presumably on their way to college. They stroll through the common room, which has a pool table, a table tennis table and two screens with consoles for gamers. ‘I might be behind those a little too often,’ Lucas says.
Students leaving the building pass in front of the reception desk, where hostess Laura rules the roost, answers the phone, keeps records and manages many more things. Once students have stepped out the front door, they step left or right, depending on where they have parked their bikes.
The rooms are not too big, but the price of 550 euros a month… ‘That’s doable, compared to Paris’, Lucas laughs. ‘On the other hand, there is absolutely nothing here that you can compare to Paris.’ He points to the three-storey containers and suddenly makes his excellent English sound boldly French: ‘Zis is notte Paris, monsieur.’
Groningen’s finest spots, according to Lucas: Stadpark and all the cycle paths
According to him, the living environment actually has only one drawback, the containers are a bit noisy. ‘We’ve agreed not to play any loud music after 11 o’clock. That does help.’
The noisiness is especially annoying when there are arguments. ‘That doesn’t happen often, fortunately. But I have left once for that reason. Losing my stress in the park.’
Lucas likes Groningen’s Stadspark (that’s Dutch for City Park), which is a few minutes’ walk away from The Village. But he likes the cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands even more. ‘That is an example for the whole world. In France, cycling is dangerous, here it is so ingrained. The facilities, those special paths where no other traffic is allowed. That’s just fantastic. It also constantly reminds me that transport can be environmentally friendly.’