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Housing
The best way for students to have regular, long-term
contact with Parisians is to live with them. Students’ housing situations
can offer them a unique means to encounter, observe, and imitate French
behaviors, have conversations in French, and take part in everyday Parisian life. We thus
offer
students arrangements that will provide them with the most
contact with French people.
Students are housed in home with French people and
share two to three dinners per week with their hosts, who also provide daily
continental breakfasts for them. Occasionally two bedroom apartments to
share with a young French person are available; in this case a budget us
provided for several meals per week to be organized and cooked together.
We ask students to fill out a detailed housing
questionnaire before they leave for Paris, and the program’s assistant
director reserves a housing situation for them based on their answers. The
VWPP monitors all the housing
situations carefully and reevaluates them every semester.
If students are staying for the year, they are free to arrange their own housing
arrangements for their second semester, but they must live with native
French speakers. They must give their
addresses to the resident director as soon as they are available and must
inform the office in advance of any change of address.
Room and modified board (2-3 dinners per week and all
continental breakfast) are included in the tuition fee. Students must budget
for their meals outside of those provided by their hosts.
Matters pertaining to students' and hosts' duties and
responsibilities are stipulated clearly in a program contract that he
students review and sign with their host families at the beginning of their
stay.
Cultural and
Extracurricular Activities
The program organizes numerous activities and visits
both to introduce students to the great monuments of French culture and to
help them understand the working realities of everyday France. Visits to a
bakery and a cheese shop (followed by a cheese tasting), a wine
tasting, and a cooking class in a French home provide an introduction to
French “gastronomie.” We organize guided visits to major exhibits, evenings
at the ballet, opera, theater, or shows, and dinners and receptions at Parisian
restaurants, Reid Hall, or in the director’s home to which French students
and professors are invited. Excursions outside of Paris to such places as Chartres, Rouen, Giverny, Vaux-le-Vicomte, Fontainebleau, Milly la Forêt,
Barbizon, and Reims and Epernay, are an integral part of the program. Such
excursions typically involve picnics, guided tours, and meals featuring
regional specialties.
The VWPP also offers a stipend to each student to
reimburse their weekly extracurricular activities, museums, monuments and
cinema entrance fees, weekend excursions or vacations organized through
French organizations.
Because it is easier to become acquainted with people
who share one’s interests, we encourage students to integrate themselves
into French society by participating in some regularly scheduled
extracurricular activity: they should join an athletic team, a choir, or a
hiking club, for example, or take dance or art classes. We help students
find these groups and opportunities and get in touch with them. The
abovementioned stipend can be to help pay for such activities.
Students may participate in an Intensive Immersion
Project during vacations or long weekends. Hiking, horseback riding,
canoe-kayaking, windsurfing, intensive yoga classes, master classes in dance
or music, archeological digs, and stays in “chambers d’hôtes” in a specific
region of France are just some of the programs in which VWPP students have
participated during the last few years by enrolling in “stages” organized by
associations like l’UCPA, Rempart, Chevalvacances, and Gîtes de France. The
main requirement is that the student be immersed in an exclusively
francophone environment. Students find that they discover another region of
France, speak exclusively French, and make friends on these “stages.” We
help students find programs of interest to them. Students who are interested in an Intensive
Immersion Project should contact the VWPP early on to discuss the
possibilities and should plan to spend part or all of a vacation (Toussaint,
winter or spring) participating in it.
The VWPP also arranges volunteer student teaching with
the local schools. Students
may volunteer to serve as English-language teaching
assistants in Parisian primary or secondary schools, or a French university,
working with teachers and conducting small conversation groups. This gives
students the opportunity to learn firsthand about the French school system
and to meet young French people and their teachers.
Other types of internship opportunities are often
available outside of the school system such as volunteering through the Centre du Bénévolat
de Paris (meeting with the aged in French hospitals, after-school tutoring
in community centers, a variety of tasks with other non-profit or
humanitarian organizations), or working with a dance school, publishers, an
art gallery, a business analyst and consultant, or the World Wildlife Fund.
We encourage students to follow up on personal contacts in Paris. A list of
opportunities will be provided during the Paris orientation session
dedicated to this topic. Students apply for these internships, which
last for approximately 8-10 weeks, by the second week of classes.
Health InsuranceAll students
must be covered by health insurance while they are abroad. All students must
also purchase the International Student Identity Card, which provides
additional insurance coverage as well as other benefits.
Vassar students will be billed for Vassar insurance while studying abroad.
They should contact the Bursar’s Office if they desire an insurance waiver.
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