Georgia Tech-Lorraine - An American Island in a French Sea (Part 1) 
by Andrew Kerr
November 2007

In this four-part series we look at Georgia Tech-Lorraine, a campus of Georgia Tech located in Metz, France.

Imagine, if you will, the strangeness of the following scene: I awake at a hotel in a charming French city—the sort of French city where the bakeries open before dawn to serve croissants and espressos to early-bird pedestrians on their ways to work, where cathedral bells chime every half hour, and where kids play accordions on the streets in the hopes of scoring some silver and gold change. I board one of the many buses (it's France, so the buses run frequently and reliably—at least when there isn't a strike) and ride ten minutes to a beautifully landscaped park (boasting a decent-sized lake and lush, green lawns) on which stand several sleek, modern buildings. And here, overlooking a lawn dotted with foraging European bird species (white-faced crows called rooks; enormous pigeons called woodpigeons; and small, skittish black and white birds called wagtails—actually, scratch that, this is France, so those birds are actually known locally as the corbeau freux, the pigeon ramier, and, of course, the bergonnette grise) I walk up to a building that sports two distinctive words that I have never seen in so unfamiliar a location before:

"Georgia Tech."

Once inside that building I hear the sounds of college students chatting away in English—American English—and find myself standing before a photograph, carefully hung on a wall in the administrative office, of Georgia Tech's mascot Buzz (or, technically, a person dressed in the Buzz outfit) riding around in the Ramblin' Wreck. It's as if I have stepped through some sort of interdimensional portal and been deposited right back into Atlanta. I half-expect my own supervisor to show up at any moment to ask me how this article is coming along.

This is Georgia-Tech, but it is also Lorraine, France; it is, sensibly enough, Georgia Tech-Lorraine, or GT-L for short. Every year a few hundred students from both sides of the pond who are associated with Georgia Tech's schools of electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering, and computer science drop in for a few months to take classes and experience the same weird pleasure that I did in finding so American an island in so French a town.

Continue reading...

Part Two: Location, Location, Location/Getting Down to Business
Part Three: The Global Nature of Work/"Uh, English, Please?"
Part Four: The Student Perspective/So in Conclusion...