Page 66 - A Life - my Live - my path

Higher education – emotional moment !

Saint Verhaegen's Day, which is celebrated every year on
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20 November, was approaching. It was traditional for
students to collect pocket money in the streets of Brussels
and in department stores a week before Saint V's Day. This
was a very important activity for some students, so many of
them left their courses to go and beg. One not-so-friendly
tradition was to throw flour at middle-class people who
refused to pay their tithes on Saint V's Day. These traditions
still exist today.
What was remarkable about that first year was the level
and quality of the training I had received in secondary school
mathematics compared with other students who came from
all over Wallonia and, given the specialisation in nuclear
sciences, sometimes even from Flanders. Some students had

not yet tackled integral calculus when I had already studied
simple, double, triple and curvilinear integrals.
To come back to my 1st year, to summarize, I mismanaged
my time, my schedule and above all my study plans. In short,
nothing was right. So I ended up in the June session for
which I had overestimated my ability to memorise and
seriously underestimated the number of pages I had to
study. For example, I had planned 3 days of study for the
physics course, whereas 5 or 6 would have been necessary.
As a result, I missed the physics exam as well as other
subjects (which bored me to tears) and, given the backlog
that had built up over the year, the September session didn't
change a thing. Anyway, I failed my first year, but I think

61 Founder of ULB in 1834.
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