A short break during a visit to Neuschwanstein Castle

Author: Cole McCallum | Major: Mechanical Engineering and Physics | Semester: Spring 2025
Throughout the last six months I’ve been privileged enough to spend a semester as a visiting student at CentraleSupélec engineering school just outside of Paris, France. Through this experience I became acquainted with a wholly different way of looking at physics and the engineering process while forming connections that will last a lifetime. My time at this
incredible university helped me discover what I’m truly passionate about while making a mark at the alma mater of Gustave Eiffel and other visionaries of French science and engineering. I was able to apply as a student at CS through a special mechanism wherein I’d complete a
semester long project in addition to a schedule of select courses tailored to my major. While my courses in the College of Engineering here in Fayetteville left me well prepared to tackle my semester project, I found myself at the beginning of a very steep learning curve when it came to
my courses. In my very first Physics of Waves lecture I discovered that our ‘review material’
included math that wasn’t even taught to undergraduates in my major! Luckily, I started studying
with a French student named Dorian who later became my best friend here. It turned out he was
completely lost in all the areas I had a good grasp on, and vice versa. You could say that you’d
get one great engineer by mixing an American and a Frenchman together!
At CentraleSupélec international students are free to join clubs and associations related to their
interests, so I decided to dip my toes in a number of different activities while also trying things
I’d never had the chance to do back home. One association cooked French dishes from scratch
for the student body each week, while another worked on setting up elaborate pyrotechnics for
the electronic / French hip-hop student parties taking place every weekend. It was here that I
made friends with students from Germany, South Korea, Brazil and everywhere else on earth,
along with France of course. While I certainly missed calling the hogs like I do back home, I also
think I’ll equally miss seeing a museum before having a picnic with a dozen friends on the
Champ de Mars on a late Friday afternoon.
Compared to the US, our school gave us plenty of time off, and my visiting student agreement in
particular gave me enormous flexibility to set my hours. Besides mandatory lectures for my
selected courses, I was free to work on my project at any time. This allowed me to pack up and
study in central Paris before a night out with friends, or to take long trips around Europe while
completing portions of my semester project on my computer. That’s not to say that there weren’t
periods when no one was studying. Being one of the most prestigious institutions in the world,
Paris Saclay and CentraleSupélec professors expected their students to be wizards in math and
physics. All of this meant that students here practice a mentality of ‘work hard, play hard.’ Every
student had the responsibility to attend lectures and study, but we were treated as future
engineers and scientists and were therefore expected to know how to manage our time well.
During breaks and vacations, I went to see the northern lights and go skiing in Finland, took
night trains between the capitals of central Europe, went on a cycling trip across the Netherlands
and Belgium, and toured castles and medieval villages in the UK. One of the best aspects of
living in Paris was the easy access to high-speed trains towards everywhere in Europe, and
luckily for my budget, every city I visited had a large number of budget youth hostels to stay in.
Overall, I got to visit 10 countries over the course of the semester, each one culturally distinct
and beautiful in its own way. In my opinion, the close proximity of so many different ways of
thinking are what make Europe such a great place to study in.
My favorite course at CS was called “Black Swans: Data Analysis in Particle Physics and
Cosmology,” and it was here that I realized where I wanted to focus my goals once I finish my
degree next year. I was given the opportunity to manage a division of around 25 students and
present our work on a joint application project to other students and faculty. After a week of hard
work, I was ecstatic to show off what we accomplished in such a short time. The feeling of
navigating different cultures and languages to achieve something great, this is what I hope to do
for the rest of my career. While many in Fayetteville might not be aware of it, France is home to
some of the finest scientists and engineers on earth. I believe that working jointly with other
cultures is how we’ll build things previous generations never thought possible.