La Universidad de Cantabria

The University of Cantabria in Santander differs from our home university in Ghent in many ways. The university was founded in 1972 and because it is pretty young a first remarkable fact is that the buildings of almost all faculties –exceptions are e.g. schools of medicine and nautical engineering– are nicely lined up next to eachother in the Avenida de los Castros, the street of the university. Therefore, you won’t see any students rushing on their bicycles from one campus or faculty to another. Actually, although Santander is a coast town, riding a bike is quite impossible here, for roads in the direction city center – University are too much uphill and downhill…
Another funny thing is that inside the building of the faculties of Law and Economics & Company Sciences there is actually an office of a bank –Banco de Santander– and also of a savings&insurace agency –Caja Cantabria. All payments for registration at university or for sports activities have to be arranged in the Banco de Santander…
There are around 11.000 students studying at this university. If I am correct this is about three times less than in Ghent, but I think that accommodation like computer rooms, working libraries and sports possibilities are as good, or even better than in Ghent. In every faculty you have very nicely equipped computer rooms and one of the buildings in the street of the university is the Pabellón de Deportes, the Sports Pavilion.

Enough of commercials… My lovely Italian assistant Martina and I talked to some of the local students. Our first interviewees –who didn’t feel like being in a picture– think it is a good university to study at: dynamic, well equipped,… I didn’t perfectly understand the minor points so I forgot them… According to some other students (see third picture), classes start way too early for the Spanish rhythm. Too early means 8:30, as in Ghent, but you need to know that the hours in Spain are used a bit differently. Classes until 20:30 are common and people have dinner starting from 21h. (My Spanish roommates have dinner around 22:30…) Two girls studying engineering (see first picture) think that the atmosphere to work in the library of the Economics Faculty is way better than in the library of the Engineers, for students are more quiet here and not chatting all the time. Four fourth year mathematic students claim that their studies are too difficult… We also talked to 3 girls (see fourth picture) in their first year of civil engineering (burgerlijk bouwkunde). They told us that all classes they have are mathematics and fysics, and also a little bit of constructional drawing… Three boys (see last picture) in their first year of industrial engineer (burgerlijk ingenieur) complain about the lack of girls in their classes.

As you see, the way how students experience things is quite the same as in Belgium and I suppose a bit the same as in all universities. Pictures of this reportage are to find on http://picasaweb.google.com/brechtfevery/LaUniversidadDeCantabria


Special thanks and credits go to my Italian assistant Martina, 2nd year student in Comercial Languages at the university of Macerata in the center of Italy.