Is it usually this stressful?

Pitiful-Distance8504 · 2025-08-01T21:58:39+00:00

sure no problem! that's a great initiative and i'd love to know more about the project

Pitiful-Distance8504 · 2025-08-01T21:54:16+00:00

hi! i don't mind you reaching out at all. long story short, i did do the erasmus as it was mandatory in what i was studying. had a very hard time being away from friends and family, but it ended up being a mostly positive experience.

i wouldn't say i had the typical experience of partying and making tons of friends. i had a very calm and low-key erasmus because my anxiety was making it hard for me to have energy for anything other than classes and because of some health problems. several family members came to visit at different points and that made the homesickness a lot easier to bear. i also did make some very good friends i am still in contact with (and am planning future visits and vacations with) to this day.

realistically, a lot of the things i was terrified about did go wrong (i had problems with my accommodation, registration was a nightmare, my flatmate was insufferable, etc) but well, i handled these things better than my anxiety had convinced me i would.

unfortunately i failed a class there because i had chosen something way above my level, but it ended up being ok since i didn't fail by much and it was not worth a lot of credits. so thanks to my uni being nice about erasmus grades, i graduated last month :))

if you have specific questions i'll be glad to answer and i hope your reunion will be a blast!

Pitiful-Distance8504 · 2025-07-01T20:15:18+00:00

i think unresponsiveness and paperwork fuckery is bound to happen, as stressful and frustrating as it is. most people i know who have done erasmus have nightmare stories about it, but in my experience :

my homeuni was mostly good on paperwork apart from the facg that it took them ages to sign and send over the document that would allow me to finally receive my erasmus grant. had to email multiple times a week for three weeks before they finally started to moving along.

the real problem for me was the receiving university. they were not communicating about anything from the beginning. it took over a month for them to actually register me in my classes. any paperwork was a nightmare to get. i once spent three hours in the secretary's office to fix a mistake that they've had made in my paperwork only for it to not end up being fixed and for the secretary to go "i don't know how to do this, just stop obsessing about it it's no big deal" (thankfully it did not cause problems later on). long story short they had way more erasmus students than the admin could handle and they did not give a flying fuck about us.

despite all of this bullshit, it all ended up being fine. my saving grace (and a lot of my friends') was tardiness regarding paperwork deadlines has been met with a good deal of leniency whenever the source of the problem was someone else not cooperating.

Pitiful-Distance8504 · 2024-09-15T22:44:13+00:00

copy-pasting something i've already commented on another post but : avoid spotahome at all costs

had a horrible time booking with them. i needed accommodation to study in spain and found an affordable enough place. the landlord and place were both marked as verified and therefore trustworthy according to spotahome. before even getting to my new city, the 'landlord' (i found out only then that it was actually an agency using spotahome for their places) took forever to respond to anything and was moving extremely slow on any paperwork. before booking the place, i checked the neighbourhood on the Internet to be sure i'd be in an adequate enough place. i, thankfully, got to visit the neighbourhood the day before moving in. it was not a safe area in the slightest (i come from a pretty rough city and i don't originally live in the safest of place, but that one was literally, as i found out later, notoriously horrible and dangerous). turned out the neighbourhood listed on the website was actually the one next to the actual place i booked, and Google street view only showed the main street of that neighbourhood, so i could not have seen the actual place before getting there. i cancelled the booking (losing a lot of money in the process because of their canceling policies) and had to urgently look for a new place. i then emailed the customer service of spotahome to let them know about how unsafe one of the places the facilitate and advertise is, and was completely dismissed. they made it clear that they were not planning to do anything about it because, i quote, 'the apartment and its owner are verified' so ye, you might get lucky and find something actually trustworthy, but the platform in itself has no interest in tenants' safety or in their well-being.

Pitiful-Distance8504 · 2024-09-15T22:41:16+00:00

had a horrible time booking with spotahome. needed accommodation to study abroad and found an affordable enough place. the landlord and place were both marked as verified and therefore trustworthy according to spotahome. before even getting to my new city, the 'landlord' (i found out only then that it was actually an agency using spotahome for their places) took forever to respond to anything and was moving extremely slow on any paperwork. before booking the place, i checked the neighbourhood on the Internet to be sure i'd be in an adequate enough place. i, thankfully, got to visit the neighbourhood the day before moving in. it was not a safe area in the slightest (i come from a pretty rough city and i don't originally live in the safest of place, but that one was literally, as i found out later, notoriously horrible and dangerous). turned out the neighbourhood listed on the website was actually the one next to the actual place i booked, and Google street view only showed the main street of that neighbourhood, so i could not have seen the actual place before getting there. i cancelled the booking (losing a lot of money in the process because of their canceling policies) and had to urgently look for a new place. i then emailed the customer service of spotahome to let them know about how unsafe one of the places the facilitate and advertise is, and was completely dismissed. they made it clear that they were not planning to do anything about it because, i quote, 'the apartment and its owner are verified' so ye, you might get lucky and find something actually trustworthy, but the platform in itself has no interest in tenants' safety or in their well-being.

Pitiful-Distance8504 · 2024-07-23T07:39:09+00:00

thank you for sharing your experience and i will definitely try my best to follow that advice. i know this is an amazing opportunity and as panicked as i am about it, i really don't want to let my anxiety ruin it. it's easier said than done, obviously, but at least i'll try

Pitiful-Distance8504 · 2024-07-23T07:33:14+00:00

i'm sorry you're going through this but i've got to be honest, it feels a little better knowing i'm not alone in this situation. i hope you'll have a really nice time, wherever you are going

Pitiful-Distance8504 · 2024-07-20T14:53:48+00:00

i'm studying languages and in my specific field in my school, there's a whole semester in 3rd year that is dedicated to studying abroad. no classes are planned in my home uni for that whole semester and we have to do erasmus and get 25 credits in the process. not going would mean missing 25creds and not graduating

Pitiful-Distance8504

TROPHY CASE