I can easily start by saying, in the most stereotypical manner, that I did not know what I signed up for or that I am constantly doubting my choice or that I was scared when it begun back in October. Neither of those is true. They are complete lies because they cannot be looked at individually, all three represent different forms of a bigger, stronger and scarier feeling called insecurity. And boy, oh boy, prepare to embrace this sense of uneasiness because this whole “Law” thing that you are currently preparing for is so much more than your intellectual level or your ability to memorize new and abstract concepts. In my case, it is a bad case of “What in the world am I doing here?”.
My name is Cătălin Velișcu and I am a first-year student at the Faculty of Law of the Bucharest University and a student of the French-Romanian Law College or the Collège juridique franco-roumain des études européens, if you are also a baguette and croissant-enjoyer just like myself. An important detail about my following story is the pandemic factor that you must keep in mind at all times. My experience is solely based on the past six months of university that were entirely taught from home. In the next couple of words, I will try to respond to that initial question and I truly hope that I will be able to give you a helpful insight into my experience with both Romanian and French ways of approaching the subject of Law.
First and foremost, the biggest challenge both I and most of my colleagues have identified is how you manage time. As a year-one student, you will have your Romanian Law courses in the morning and the French travaux-dirigés in the afternoon or evening. Keep in mind that, ideally, you have to fit in some individual work somewhere in between this classes in order to keep up the pace with what is going on with each subject. However impossible it may seem, it is very doable, but you have to figure it out on your own. I cannot stress it enough when I’m saying that you are not prepared for the amount of work and for the fact that time is going to be your number one enemy, especially if you want to maintain a life outside of it.
It is not all so grim though. Keeping a balance between Facultate and Collège is your duty, but there are some opportunities that may make it more humane. Firstly, the timetable varies for the French Law, while remaining the same for the whole Romanian semester. Consequently, your schedule is going to be more or less packed depending on the period of the semester, giving you occasional windows in which you can catch up. Secondly, each semester, you have the possibility of equivalence between two similar subjects from the two Law faculties, so you do not have to learn for two different exams. For example, in this second semester, we study Constitutional Law at Collège and, therefore, I will not participate in the Romanian exam at a similar subject. Finally, it is very important to keep in mind that, although it may seem like you are studying simultaneously at two different universities, you are still studying Law. This might very obvious, but it’s a very happy feeling and when you understand something very fast because you have studied it previously at any of the two schools.
Even if time is my biggest problem, “What in the world am I doing here?” usually pops into my head when I realise how much I am required to accumulate all on my own. Disclaimer, no one is going to be there to hold your hand before the Roman Law exam or when you are hyperventilating because you have an oral exam at Constitutional Law. Even more, no one can read and summarize those weekly 30 pages for the European Law seminar in your place and surely no one else but you can write that dissertation on the Fifth French Republic for the next seminar of Constitutional Law. What I am trying to say is that you are going to ask yourself a lot of times why do you need to know all that stuff. At least I did. Unlike carbohydrates from fast-food, the satisfaction is not instantaneous. All that hard work and all of those late hours are going to be worth it. There are certain rare moments when all that crazy amount of information is going to click in your head and you are going to finally understand. You may be drinking coffee with your best pal and laugh at hearing yourself talking so freely about the powers of the French president during the Fourth Republic, about a reform made by the Roman emperor Justinian or about how easily it comes for both of you now to read the articles about nullity from the Romanian Civil Code.
To sum up, at least from my experience, balancing these two different ways of teaching is defined by how well you manage time and how well you come to terms with the fact that you must become an ideal self-learner. I am nowhere near mastering these two elements, but I think the first step is to identify these two goals and I now hope that I would have listened to similar advice I had received before starting this weird relationship with Law.