The Experience of Law Students on the Erasmus Study Exchange Programme - Pre-departure Student Impressions
Eric Jeanpierre, Kingston University
(Joint paper with Graeme Broadbent)
This paper forms the first part of an ongoing larger study in which we seek to evaluate the short and long-term impact of the Erasmus experience, with a particular focus on the effects of the year spent abroad on law students from British universities. Law is a particularly fruitful subject area for such a study, as students will be studying in a country with a different legal culture to that with which students are familiar. In addition, it is clear that the experience is not limited to legal study but extends to working within a different educational culture, as well as living in another country over an extended period of time. The object of this paper is to explore and analyse actual expectations and experiences of students more fully so as to understand the impact of the Erasmus programme on their lives and careers. To these ends, information forming the basis of this article has been obtained by means of a questionnaire and a series of semi structured interviews with students at Kingston Law School who were about to embark on their year abroad over a period of five years (2007-2011).