When prospective students ask me what HEC Paris was actually like, they usually want the highlight reel: the friends, the lake, the parties, the internships. That part is real. But the harder parts shaped me more than the highlights ever did. The struggles at HEC are not unique to me, and they are not unique to HEC, but most current students I talk to say the same things. So here is the honest list of what was difficult, and what I did to get through each one.
Feeling overwhelmed all the time
In my first year I was overwhelmed almost constantly. Group projects, classes, career events, internship applications, social plans, language practice, hobbies, cooking. It felt like juggling bowling balls that kept getting heavier. Whenever I focused on one thing, three others felt neglected.
Three things eventually helped.
I started prioritising. Separating urgent from important. When I had three managers at MAC Cosmetics each handing me tasks every week, I had no choice but to figure this out. The same logic applies in M1 when seven courses are all asking for output at once.
I started planning. My calendar became my anchor. I used Notion to map out the week, including social events and obligations, not just work. Seeing it all in one view made it less overwhelming than holding it in my head.
I started accepting. Ali Abdaal once said you can choose to be happy with how you spent your time. If you constantly think you could have done more, you trap yourself in regret. Choosing to be content with what you did frees you to do more tomorrow. This took years to internalise but is the most useful mental shift I made.
The competition feels intense
HEC is selective. Everyone in your cohort was at the top of wherever they came from. That can fuel an ego-driven environment where everyone is trying to outdo everyone else. Combined with internship application season, it is easy to slide into a state where every conversation makes you question whether you belong. Imposter syndrome is common.
Three things helped.
I stopped comparing. Everyone at HEC came from different backgrounds. Some had work experience, some did not. Some spoke four languages, some spoke one. The math of comparing my path to theirs was never going to work in anyone’s favour.
I focused on my own objectives. Mine only became sharp after my LA internship in the gap year. It took me a year and a half to know what I really wanted. That timeline is normal.
I changed my relationship with social media. When I was in a comparison spiral, Instagram made it worse. A week off the app reset my baseline.
Not knowing French
This was either a minor inconvenience or a serious limitation depending on what I wanted to do that day. In moments where my goals had nothing to do with France, it did not matter. In moments where I wanted to integrate, build friendships, or work at a French company, it mattered a lot.
In my first year I joined a media club that took us to different media companies’ offices. I met a famous classical musician once and could not understand a word she said. I sat through events I had clearly been invited to and felt completely cut off. It was demoralising.
I am much better at French now. It took years of consistent work, language exchanges, watching French shows, and pushing through awkward conversations. I broke down how I learnt French separately. If you are going to study in France, start learning before you arrive.
Feeling like I was spending too much money
I grew up in a country with a weaker currency where everything was cheaper. Every euro spent in Paris felt like a hard mental conversion back to rupees. I felt like I had to choose between spending responsibly and making the most of my time. No matter what I did, I felt like I was overspending.
Two things solved this for me.
I built a bottom-up budget. I started with each category, food, rent, entertainment, transport, and assigned a number to each. I added them up to get a monthly total. Once that total was set, I stopped converting individual purchases back to rupees. Instead I looked at each spend as a fraction of the monthly budget. Do I have room for that jacket this month? That question is easier to answer than “is this expensive.”
I tracked actual spending. A budget without tracking is fiction. I logged what I spent each month by category, then compared it against my plan. That feedback loop showed me where I was over and under, and I adjusted from there. If you want a real number, I broke down my HEC Paris monthly expenses and the three-year total.
Constantly moving around
Coming straight from undergrad to HEC, I missed my old friends and the familiarity of Manipal. The novelty of being in a new country wore off and I started to feel disconnected. Then I made friends, then I moved to LA. Then back to Paris. Then the pandemic. Then to campus, which felt isolated from the city.
The constant resets are part of the gap year structure and an international career. What helped most was building a strong relationship with myself. Wherever I went, I was the only constant. Anchoring my sense of stability inside me rather than in a place made the moves less painful.
Learning to make friends faster also helped. Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is a useful read for this. The basics work.
I covered the deeper version of this in moving abroad is hard and feeling at home abroad. Both are honest about the loneliness side that does not show up on Instagram.
The bigger point
Reality is usually more realistic than the highlight reel. HEC is fun, demanding, expensive, isolating, intellectually intense, and genuinely transformative. It is all of those things at once, often in the same week. If you are heading into it and you have read this far, I wrote a longer piece on whether the whole experience was worth it. The short answer is yes. The long answer is that the struggles were the reason it was worth it.