As someone currently spending a year in Rome at LUISS Guido Carli, I will try to give a balanced view of exchange life: the highs, lows, and what I wish I’d known before.
If you’ve only lived in the UK, you will experience at least a little bit of culture shock. Even with travel experience, daily life abroad – manners, greeting, mealtimes, public transport etc. – will probably feel unfamiliar and potentially overwhelming, especially with a language barrier.
However, if you put in time and effort, you eventually adjust and the “outsider” feeling fades as customs become normal. For me, even the fashion was a shock: at LUISS, dressing professionally is the norm – hoodies and crocs are very out of place, but you fit right in with a designer suit and stiletto heels.
Prior to the exchange, the administration and months of endless paperwork are truly a bureaucratic maze. Academic matters such as the Learning Agreement and independently handling class selection and your own timetable are surprisingly complicated.
For visas (and Italy’s additional residency permit), documents may not be in English. For my visa, I had to travel from Newcastle to London, and my passport was taken from me for almost 2 months.
Getting the permit entailed a three-hour post office wait, an eight-month delayed police appointment, and 100 euro in fees.
The admin felt like a nightmare and if you’re a non-EU student, you have to do this early or risk not going abroad at all.
If the university doesn’t give you accommodation, you need to organise it yourself, ideally in June/July to avoid staying in short-term leases, hotels or air BnBs throughout your exchange (I know over 10 people who ended up in these kinds of precarious situations). If you’re organised though, all of these tasks are manageable and allow you to have peace of mind when you are finally settled in.
At LUISS, contact hours are more than double what I had at Edinburgh. There are only small school-class environments – no separate lectures and tutorials – which enables it to be engaging, despite the far heavier workload, enabling a closer level of interaction with your professors.
The university is modern with amazing facilities and only 8000 students. It offers constant professional and networking events, and class attendance is compulsory. Students are generally highly disciplined and motivated. Assessments are more varied and practical – graded presentations, participation, simulations, written exams, and essays. Class content feels grounded in real-world application, with some professors being diplomats or EU officials.
One clear downside is LUISS’ clear neoliberal bias – it is funded by major Italian corporations and classes completely omit radical or critical theories. It is also located near to embassies and the Carabinieri headquarters, so it is safe but guarded by the military police, so non-students need security clearance to enter campus.
Socially, meeting people can be daunting since you are basically a fresher again. While UK students are not officially “Erasmus” anymore – we don’t receive the funding – all non-EU students can still participate in the Erasmus organisation at the host university.
They host an orientation week with day trips, sports, language classes, parties, and dinners, and this is the easiest way to “find your people” since hundreds of exchange students attend them.
It is surprisingly easy to meet people on exchange, more so than when you are a fresher because you’ve done this process once before. Joining societies is also fun, and your citywide Erasmus organisation offers a huge variety of sports clubs.
The overall living costs are like Edinburgh. In my neighbourhood, Trieste, which is more expensive but very safe and only 15 minutes from campus, my rent is £500/month. Public transport is very cheap but unreliable – there are always strikes – so a monthly electric scooter subscription is useful and cost-efficient. Bills are lower but groceries are more expensive (especially without a Lidl nearby). Eating and drinking out is significantly cheaper – a large Peroni is 2.50 euro, and every kind of coffee on campus just 60 cents.
However, admin costs – like visas, travelling back to the UK, and possibly a few spontaneous trips – can balance out savings. On the plus side, maintenance loans from Student Finance increase for study abroad.
The weather will probably be far better than in Edinburgh and professionally, academically, and personally studying abroad enormously expands your horizons. You gain language skills, meet lifelong international friends and discover career paths and life opportunities you may never have previously considered. Overall, despite the challenges, it is worthwhile.
“LUISS sede centrale Via Pola” by Carlo Dani is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.