Some basic facts about the curriculum

If you come as an Erasmus student, the first thing you have to know is whether you will be inscribed as an undergraduate or a graduate student here. For the second option you need to have a University degree at the time of your arrival. A graduate student will be allowed to register both in graduate or undergraduate courses at the University of Cantabria. An undergraduate student will not be allowed to register in graduate courses. If you are an undergraduate interested in a graduate course, you will normally be allowed to attend the course (with the consent of the teacher) but it might be impossible to give you official marks.

The undergraduate studies

What follows describes the mathematics curriculum only, even if undergraduate Erasmus students are allowed to take courses from different curricula.

The first thing to be said is that the curriculum is undergoing a process of change which begins in the year 2000/2001. So I will briefly describe both the old and the new curriculum. Both curricula consist of five years of studies. The reader of this will have to be aware that each academic year one year of the old curriculum dissapears and one of the new appears. For example, in 2000/2001 there will be only courses from the first year of the new curriculum and years 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the old. A regular student cannot take courses of both curricula, but Erasmus student can.

The old curriculum

In the old curriculum, a student has four courses per year, each of them lasting for the whole year: first week of october-last week of may. Each course is awarded 15 ECTS credits. Go back to the Erasmus page for details on the courses.

A typical course will be taught one hour every week-day, at the same time. Usually three or four of these hours are lecturing classes, and the remaining are devoted to problem solving. Although there will be some basic reference books for the courses (many available in english), professors do not usually follow closely one single book; therefore students must take and study classroom notes. Classes and exams are given in spanish, although some teachers may allow students to answer in English. Exams are taken in February and early June for the two semesters of each course; typically they consist on several theoretical and practical questions that must be answered (written) during several hours (two to four). If a student fails one (or both) of them he still can pass the course with another exam at the end of June (this time an exam of the whole year). Finally, another exam is done in September for those who failed in June.

In some courses the first and second semesters have rather independent contents (e.g. in Topology II, the semesters deal respectively with point-set and algebraic topology) but the University cannot give official credit for a student passing only the exam of one of the semesters. If an Erasmus students needs only one of the two semesters, the Erasmus coordinator and/or the teacher of the course can issue a letter stating the contents of that semester and the mark obtained in the exam, but the student has to make sure that this letter will be sufficient to have recognition at his/her home University.

There are only a few exceptions to these rules: some courses have 4 or 6 hours per week, and in the third year a student follows two half-year courses and three full-year courses instead of four full-year courses.

Erasmus students are given more freedom than regular students in the sense that they can follow courses from different undergraduate programs. It goes without saying that Erasmus students will be attending the same class as the spanish students of the course; thus the above description is useful information for an Erasmus visitor. The examination rules, however, can be adapted within the Erasmus coordination to the particular requirementes/needs of Erasmus students (some prefer not to take the exams, some ask just for an attendance certificate without records...).

Also, Erasmus students can freely take courses from different levels in the five years of studies. Please remember that spanish students are supposed to follow the curriculum in a consecutive way (although they are allowed not to do so) so a third year course assumes knowledge from the previous two years... The schedule of courses is made in such a way that the set of courses for a given year is scheduled in a disjoint, consecutive, morning (9h-13:15h) timetable. Mixing courses from different years has therefore potential difficulties of coincidence of two courses at the same time. The exact schedule of every course is known in May of the previous academic year (although probably not published in the Web pages until Septemeber or so). This potential difficulty is usually not so great in practice, with some flexibility from the part of the Erasmus student and his/her home Erasmus coordinator in the choice of courses and with the advice of the local Erasmus coordinator.

The new curriculum

Apart of the structural differences, the new curriculum is meant to have a more applied orientation than the old one (observe that the old one has been mostly unchanged since the 70's). In particular, students are introduced to computers since the very first year. The other significant difference is that all courses are semestrial, and also that the number of credits of each course varies from 4.5 to 9 (i.e. 3 to 6 hours a week). The final exam of each course in late June is supressed. There is only one exam at the end of the course (February or June) and one in September. The courses of the first year (the only one implemented at the time of writing this) are:

First semester

Second semester

Graduate studies

A regular graduate student has to follow a specific graduate program of those offered by the University (e.g., Ph.D. program in Mathematics or Ph.D. program in Applied Mathematics and Computer Sciences). Courses are taught to a small number of students (typically, four or five per course); thus, there is a strong interrelation between students and professor. Actually, it is common that the schedule of the course be set up jointly with the involved students.

Each course has a marked "weight" given in credits, one credit being the equivalent of 10 lecturing hours. A Spanish Ph.D. student has to take 35 credits during his/her first two years of graduate studies. A typical course has 3 credits and is taught in some 4 or 5 consecutive weeks. All of them will be taught between November and June, and most of them between February and May. The exact dates are normally not known in advance... There are normally no exams; grading is done by assigning work to the student (such as reading a scientific paper related to the course and explaining it orally, writing a computer program, solving some problems, etc...).

A graduate Erasmus student will be allowed to register in courses from different graduate programs and in undergraduate courses.