University: Saint Mary’s University

City: Halifax

Country: Canada

Continent: North America

Field of study: trade management

Study type: semester abroad

I’m in my 5th semester at St. Mary’s University in Halifax and I highly recommend it. Life in Halifax is just great, you meet a lot of new people very quickly and you can have a lot of fun there. Since I’m studying industrial engineering in Germany, it wasn’t that easy for me to choose a subject, since there aren’t many subjects offered that are in the curriculum at my university of applied sciences. But in the end I found 3 courses (Human Resource Management for people management, Marketing and Strategic Management for business management). In my opinion, the courses are simpler than ours, but you have to do a lot more for them, for example give a lot of talks and presentations. The final exam only counts for about 30% of the overall grade, a system that suited me very well. Check iamaccepted.com to see best cities to live in Canada.

But Halifax is actually much more than studying: Since I only took 3 courses (like almost all other Germans), we had plenty of time to get to know this beautiful country. So we got together in a great group of about 10 to 14 Germans, who were all just as adventurous as I was. We then rented cars every other weekend and drove across the eastern provinces of Canada. We mostly stayed in so-called chalets, small holiday homes for up to 6 people, most of which are very comfortably furnished and are also affordable for students. For example, we went to Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and the north of Nova Scotia (Cape Breton) together and had many very nice weekends.

I lived in the Loyola Residence, a 22-story student residence right on campus. From my room I had a beautiful view of the whole city, the harbor and the sea, including the sunrise over the sea. The rooms are sparsely furnished (bed, desk, closet and chair), but all have a telephone with which you can make free calls throughout Nova Scotia and also have high-speed Internet access. Along with renting the room I had to buy a meal plan which was very expensive but ultimately OK as it meant I never had to cook and could eat almost any time of the day (except Saturday and Sunday mornings before 11am). The food became a bit one-sided and boring after 4 months, but mostly tasted good.

MicroEdu helped me a lot with the organization, for which I am very grateful. Without you, it would have been very difficult to enroll at a foreign university, and we also received a lot of valuable information from you, not least with the whole organization with the Baföamt, because without the financial help I would definitely not have the semester abroad can do. I had to advance all the money first, but in the end I was paid for the entire tuition, flight and health insurance. So I only had to pay for the very expensive student residence and life in Halifax myself.