Education in Spain

"A waste of time!" This would be the one sentence I would use if somebody would ask me about it. After almost finishing my first year of masters in Spain, I think it's time to write something..

I was gonna write the heading as "Education System in Spain" but then I realized that there is no system at all here. The registration, grading, courses.. everything is just a mess..

First of all, I want to tell about the courses I took. I had more or less 12 courses and from half of these I didnt learn any single thing!! yes literally nothing. I dont remember anything, I didnt pay attention to the lectures as either the prof was so boring because of his inability of teaching or his poor english or because of the content of topic was not interesting at all.. For the other half of the courses, maybe the efficiency of them were like 25% for me. That is, I spent the whole year but I gathered information which could fit to only 2-3 months, if the courses would not be full of empty talk..

Anyways, this was just an introduction about the education here..The main issues are much more deeper. Because anything can happen in Spain (at least in my Uni). Coming up with a logical reason for what has been happening is quite impossible.
Here I will give some examples:

- They may say to you that they'll take care of everything about the registration, they'd choose the courses and  register for you and everything. Then you start taking your courses.. After 2 months, some of your friend realizes that the system does  not show one of the courses you currently take. and guess what, it turns out that you are not actually enrolled to that course.. You were not even supposed to be!! Then you just stop going to that course and throw the assignments u already made to rubbish!

- You might be in a group of 6 people through out all the course. and the grading might be based on weekly papers u deliver and a final presentation (of course, you have no idea what's the weight of each delivery). Final week, you all together make your presentation and your prof says he liked your presentation and he would give a B,B+ for you.. Then the grades are announced and you got a 7 and most of your team members slightly more.. although it is possible, u have no reasoning why.. Then you find out that the prof said the same things to other groups also, but they also got 7.. One of the other groups goes and objects to the prof as he said the grade would be something like B,B+,A (yes very close interval), and this might be the answer you get: "Ohh.. I didnt know 7 was a C.. I will change your grade to 9." Even until now it's pretty awesome to hear something like this from a prof! Anyways no comment.. He didnt know the new grading system or whatever.. Afterwards, one of your team members requests the prof to change his grades also as the prof didnt know 7 was a C and now he knows it isnt so he is supposed to change all grades.. But what happens next? My group mate's grade goes from 7.2 to 8.2 where the other groups grades go from 7.2 to 9!! What kind of grading is this? I have no idea..
But this is not the end.. Because my grade is still 7!!!!!! and so is one of my group mate.. So we go to the office of the Prof and ask whats happening.. He says "let me look on papers" and brings the paper that he sent to the board which has a list of students that the grades should be changed. He checks our names.. and perfect!! Only the names of two people on the list were CROSSED OUT! He says I dont know why I did this, I dont remember.. I will change your grades to 7.8!! Oh My God!! What kind of mentality is this??!!?!
Why other group members go from 7.2 to 8.2 but our 7 goes to 7.8 only?? (Not to mention the ones that rise from 7.2 to 9)
In the end he accepts it to make 8 and thats the end of story.. In any of the steps above there's no single logical thing that I can understand.

- Moreover, here your Prof can say there will be a final exam in the end of the semester and it'll be a pass/fail exam. That is, if you get more than 50 points, you pass, otherwise you fail.. It's not gonna effect your grade. The grade is based on the assignments. Then you think it's not a problem, you go to the exam and the exam paper says it'll contribute to the final grade just like it's an assignment.. Very fair!
Then the grades are announced but not the exam results, and it's said that the exam didnt contribute the grade.. Thats it.. everybody passes the course. No logic.

- The other thing is grading of the assignments. Your grades are mainly based on two things:
First your Microsoft Word Smart Art skills!! If you draw fancy tables and figures, this will increase your grade siginificantly.. The content is the second important thing.
Secondly, your empty talking skills during the class. I understand this should effect the grade, I dont have any single objection to this. BUT, also your assignment grades might be affected by this!! Yes, your assignments are graded according to the overall image of you in the eyes of Profs.
I am personally not active during the classes and do not expect that high grades in my final records. But I just want to do what I have to do and expect to get a grade between 7-8 and do not care about the rest. More important thing is what I learn or what I wanna learn. But obviously Spanish system doesnt fit to me, as you expect to behave like in primary school where you try to use colorful pencils and pretty hand writing .. and hold up your finger as much as possible in the class. This is my thing and I'm happy with my grades that I deserve.

But, this is not always the case that you get what you deserve.. For example you can be in a group of 3 for a course and you can do 6 out of 9 assignments with your group. I mean, upload exactly the same file! And in the end your final grade might be 5 and the other members 6 and 9. And there's no explanation about the grades whatsoever.. The assignment grades are not announced (yet). I dont what were the weights of the assignments that were individual but apparently they can effect your grade tremendously.. I'm sure the weights will not be announced anyway as it will be a part of teacher's "personal assessment"..
Again, I dont think I should have had 9 or anythng I'm just talking about my relative grade, which in my opinion should have been around 7.
btw the other group mate who got 6 was the same guy that the name was crossed out in another course.. I dont know if I should make any conspiracy theories if the gossips in the teachers room has something to do with this. I'd prefer to think positive and keep this as a bad joke.


So... This was my experience in Spain. If you have any plans to study here please think twice.. if you dont change your mind, read here again.. until you change your decision..
I really dont know what the future of Spain will be with this kind of system.. I hear similar stories from my friends in other universities. I guess the trend of Spanish economy is not a surprise...

Tanger, Morocco

I'll start to write my travel notes from the soonest to the oldest as the other way around might be too difficult for me and i might never catch the current moment (Considering I have other travel plans very soon).

The last city I've been is Tanger, which is a small town in the very north of Morocco overlooking to Spain through the Strait of Gibraltar. This is one of the many Ryanair stops in Morocco which is more famous for beach tourism I suppose. There are many cheap holiday resorts to attract Spaniards. But I'm not really sure if they really succeed this as I didn't leave the city with the best impressions.

Tanger has a "Medina" (Old town) as many other cities in Morocco. This one can be considered small compared to Marrakech and Fez, and the number of shops and tea shops around was quite limited. The more famous part of the city was "Kasbah" which consists of narrow streets, white houses and blue doors. Walking around these streets and getting lost is quite enjoyable.

The photo on the left is a typical door and house from the Kasbah. There's also a museum in that area which is nothing special but you can still visit since it costs only 10 Dirhems (1 euro). There are also a few cafe/restaurants where you can go up to terrace and enjoy the view and the wind! Yes Tanger is very windy so is the beach. Don't know how people sunbath or swim in summer as the sea is wavy and the wind might be disturbing if you end up waking up buried under the sand after a nap on the beach.


The beach is a bit dirty also because of the touristic camel and horse rides. One thing that bothered us so bad there, was the behavior of some people to tourists. They were mostly mentally sick or something but they have learnt quite well how to swear in Spanish. And every single child knows how to say "Hola chicos!" in Tanger. Some of them know more that that(!)

I was quite surprised to the number of cafes, bars, clubs right next to the beach. There were even more than Barcelona. Maybe during the season it's full of Spanish people but i'm not really sure if there are that many tourists.

Here's a scene that I caught from the beach:

By the way,  about finding a hotel. If you are only going there to see the city not for facny holiday resorts, then you can do like we do. We didn't book a hotel before going, instead we had some addresses of some cheap hotels and some street names. It wasn't easy to find a clean hotel but in the end we managed to find one which is ok. It was only 4 euros per person and it had showers!!! Yes this is something hard to find in the hotels of Tanger. We checked many without showers until we found this one. It was in the same street with Hotel Madrid, Valencia, Miami.. Street name is Selahaddin Eyyubi.

The other issue is food!! If you want to try some tasty Tagine or Couscous, this is not the right address for you. You better head to Marrakech or Fes. The restaurants which have tagine were not clean or good. But in the new city part you can have better restaurants to eat fast food kind of stuff.


I'll add some of the photos I took there. Here you can check the other pictures I've taken.








This one is I suppose the tomb of Ibn Batouta. He is a famous traveler, kinda my idol.. I didnt really read any of his books, but i want to do it soon











This girl was collecting flowers from the cliff. We tried to stop her. And she was too gentle to send us a perfect smile :)






And in the end yummy snails from the market.. I dont think it was a good idea to leave them unattended :)

EMSE - European Master in Software Engineering

Emse is an Erasmus Mundus program which I've written about in my previous post.
The main host university is Universidad Politecnica de Madrid where I've been studying my first year. The other partner universities are BTH in Sweden, Technical University of Kaiserslautern in Germany and Free University of Bolzano in Italy.
When you apply for the program you are asked to declare your preferences about which 2 universities you would like to go. But this doesn't mean that you'll definitely go there. Although for most of the cases they try to consider those preferences.

You can find detailed information about the program in their website here.
I'll try to give more unofficial information. In my term 1200 people applied for this program and 12 Category-A students (non-Europe) were awarded scholarship and 8-10 Category B (Europe) students. The applications close in around december and you'll receive the results sometime in april.
I can't really say anything specific about selection criteria since I don't know anything other than the information in the website. I didn't graduate with a high GPA from my previous university (I mean less than 3/4.00) and I was surprised to be accepted. These years, it seems like they value working experience a lot since the students are a bit older and the classes mostly target them.

There are a lot of students in their 30s who are working at the same time and taking this master almost like an executive MBA program. They are not EMSE students like us but we take the same classes. Anyway, there are quite a number of EMSE students who are in between 27-30.

Hence, the classes are more focuses on Engineering part of Software. The obvious examples would be Requirement Eng, Quality Management, Project Management, etc.

Among the 4 universities, Madrid is the only one which is in a big city. The others are all in very very small areas. That's why I chose Madrid. The other common destination is Germany. People prefer it because they think there's good opportunity to find jobs. It actually applies for Sweden since BTH has good industrial connections. But people don't really like to go that north maybe :)

Well in the begining I chose Sweden for my second year. We will see how it will  be like. I'm expecting that courses will not be as hard as Germany.

That's all that comes to my mind for now..

Erasmus Mundus Program

In this post, I'll try to clarify some unknown things about Erasmus Mundus Programs. First of all, it's not a regular Erasmus Exchange program that everybody knows. This is a joint Master or a Doctorate program that allows you to graduate with at least 2 diplomas from European universities. It's not like you already have a university like in Erasmus, after you finish your undergraduate degree, you apply for these programs individually directly from the websites of the programs.
In the end, you study 1 year in one unversity and the next year in another university (this can also be 3 universities with 6 months in 2 of them and 1 year another). All the courses are offered in English and they provide VERY generous scholarships especially for non-european students.

The scholarship is about 16000 euros a year for Category A students which means non-european. Turkey is also in this part although you might come across some wrong information about this. Actually they opened a special window for Turkey and Balkans and each program accepts more or less 2 students from this window. Before this Turkey wasn't eligible. It's been only 3 years for Turkey so this program is still not very known.

For the European students the scholarship is about 6000 euros a year. This is quite weird actually, because the gap between europeans and others is really huge, and surprisingly on the favor of non-europeans.
When you search information about the programs, you'll see third-countries instead of non-european.. This doesn't mean third world country but the countries which are not host.

You can find a full list of programs in this link which is from the official page of Erasmus Mundus.

I'm studying in European Master in Software Engineering and I'll mention about this program in another post.

Cleaning the nose issue

This is something I want to talk about for a while, that annoys me constantly.
In Europe people clean their nose for example in the class with a very loud, gross sound.. Imagine you are in the class and your friend next to you makes this terrible noise.. For me it's totally disturbing. I have no idea how this has become normal here. They say it's better than constantly sniffing but still going to the bathroom is a much better option.
I'm pretty sure that in the east people don't do this as I heard that for example in Japan women always flush the toilet so that other people will not hear "those" noises when they're doing it. They also invented a fake flush noise button no to waste all the water!!
Anyways i'm teachig to as many people as i can that they'd better clean it in the bathroom or somewhere away from people =)
I don't think I can ever adapt to this. We'll see...

Seyyah Arafta Gerek

Evet ilk yazımda blog başlığını açıklamak en doğrusu olur sanırım. Ya da açıklamaya çalışmak..
Yurt dışına çıktıktan sonra bir Elif Şafak merakıyla başladı aslında her şey (Bu zamana kadar popüler olana direnme huyumdandır ki hiç elime almışlığım yoktu herhangi bir Elif Şafak kitabını). Henüz "Araf"ı okumamış olmama rağmen duyduğum kadarıyla yurt dışına öğrenci olarak çıkan bir Türk'ün hikayesi, kültürel farklılıklar, arada kalmışlıklar bahsediliyormuş kitapta. İşte böylece ne zamandır ben de yazsam bir yerlere not etsem ne güzel olur derken bugüne nasipmiş. En sevdiğim kelime "seyyah"ın yanına çok da güzel gitti bence.
Bugünden itibaren kendi arada kalmışlıklarımı, başımdan geçenleri, gözlemlerimi ya da aklıma gelen herhangi aptalca bir şeyi buralara yazacağım sanırım.
Bi yandan da niye herkese anlatıyorum sorusunun cevabını arıyorum, daha doğrusu karar aşamasındayım.
Sanırım isimsiz olmasını tercih ederim ama daha gizlilik ayarları vesaire kurcalamadım.
Bir diğer konu da güzel Türkçe'mizi katlederek mi yazıcam yoksa tüm imla kurallarına, büyük-küçük ünlü uyumuna uyacak mıyım karar veremedim daha.. Görücez bakalım..

Kalın Sağlıcakla (nası bi kelimeyse sağlıcak)