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Published March 10, 2025

7:45 am 🌅

I wake up at my room in one of the Ecole Normale’s student dorms in the heart of the historic campus by the Latin Quartier. After taking a quick breakfast, I rush downstairs and I head to the Lhomond building, just a couple hundred meters away, where most of my lessons take place.

The Lhomond Building, where most of the Physics courses take place.

8:30 am 📒

Today is a Friday, which means that my first lesson of the day is a Lecture on Quantum Mechanics! The professor advances fast and I find the course can be quite challenging, but the content is really interesting and the effort is worth it.
 

10:30 am ☕

During our short break between lessons, I always head straight to the coffee machine with a couple of friends –a bit of caffeine is needed to get through the cold winter mornings. We then run back upstairs, fearing that our next lesson might have already started.
 

10:45 am 🖊️

We’re slightly late to the Quantum Mechanics TD (short for “Travaux Dirigés”, i.e. “Guided Work”). For two hours, we get to work on exercises that help us better grasp the contents from the lectures, while an assistant professor works through the solution on the blackboard. The exercises are hard, but the teacher is really good at answering our questions at and solving our doubts, which makes it all easier. However, it’s been a long morning and hunger starts to pile up.
 

12:30 pm 🍽️

Time for our lunch break! I cross the street and enter the campus canteen with my colleagues. The food is pretty good and relatively cheap. There are three or four meal options available, but I always take the vegetarian one. The canteen is usually packed with people, so eating outside at the gorgeous yard can be a great option in sunny days. The yard is called “Cour aux Ernests”, in honor of the redfish that inhabit the pond and who are affectionately referred to as the “Ernests”.

The « Cour aux Ernests »

13:15 pm ☕

It’s time to head to the K-Fêt, the student-led cafeteria in the basement of the campus. As all the staff there are volunteers who don’t seek any profit, prices are really low. Also, the vibe is quite cool. I take the second coffee of the day with my friends and we play a game of Pac-Man at the K-Fêt’s arcade machine, fully programmed by computer science students of the Ecole.
 

14:00 pm 📒

Time to head to the fab-lab to work on my tiny research project for the French Physicists’ Tournament. My colleague and I investigate the fracture of paper, and other students work on other subjects. In February, we all traveled to Grenoble to compare our results with those of students from all over France who had been working on the same problems. Those who presented the most satisfying findings qualified to travel abroad and represent France at the International Physicists’ Tournament. (Wish us luck!).
 

18:00 pm ✨�ċ

It’s been a long day –but the weekend is finally here! Time to head back to my student room and (if I have the energy) do some reading for my philosophy course. As part of my program, I have the opportunity to take credits in other departments, which is why I was able to following a seminary of the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas, which until now it has proven to be quite interesting! Today I’ve decided to have a calm afternoon, but tomorrow I will go see some friends at one of the many bars of the Latin Quartier.
 

I hope that you enjoyed this walk through one of my days as a student at ENS, and that you found it helpful :) Thanks for reading !

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