Hi everyone, my name is Amicie and I study GSD with Politics and International Studies, and I’m in my final year. I wanted to share with you my thoughts on the teaching in GSD, but from an international student’s perspective, because I am French myself and I remember that when I was at your stage, one of my main concerns was to experience a different style of education, being in a foreign environment and a foreign language.  

The two words I want to focus on are international and interdisciplinary. So, international first of all because I think I will never stress enough how happy I am with the decision of studying abroad. Not only because it gives you the opportunity to learn a new language and improve in a new language, but I think it’s the benefits of being in an international place, which Warwick really is – you wouldn’t imagine how many different nationalities there are on campus! And I think it’s really valuable in GSD, because when we tackle these global issues, we get to hear all different perspectives and understandings from different backgrounds, which makes you consider things that otherwise you would have never considered - I think it’s extremely important.  

Above all what I think makes it so unique about the teaching quality of GSD is the interdisciplinary approach, because you get to tackle all these global issues from a wide range of different perspectives and disciplines, including Psychology, Politics, Sociology, and Economics. In order to really provide critical solutions to problems, you need to bear in mind all of these different disciplines, so I think it’s really interesting.  

I think also an important point to raise is that they really encourage us and help us to improve our capacity to find solutions to these problems. For example, the way we are being assessed is a bit different from other courses. Instead of just having to describe the problem in long essays, you get to critically think of what we can do to solve these problems. We had to write our own policy brief and create and design our own campaigns.  

Apart from that, they also want us to put into practice everything that we learn in class and get involved in our community, and be involved also in societies on campus. There are a lot of societies on campus that are related to sustainability to allow you this.  

I really hope that this has been useful for you and I wish you all the best for your exams. A très bientôt.