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 and take part in everyday Parisian life. We thus encourage students to choose an arrangement that will provide them with the most contact with French people.

Most students are housed in homes, with the option of having most of their meals, or two or three dinners, provided for them or of doing their own cooking. Independent rooms in apartments are also available. Some rooms in student dormitories and “pensions de famille” are available for year-long and second-semester students. Studio apartments are occasionally available. Some students choose to work (usually 12–15 hours of child care a week) in exchange for a room.

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. When students arrive in Paris from Bordeaux, they spend their first week in a student hostel. During this week, there will be a general meeting about housing, and students will have individual interviews with the assistant director to discuss and confirm their housing preferences. They also will have the opportunity to visit the housing situation we have reserved for them before they make a final decision. We monitor all the housing situations carefully and reevaluate them every semester.

Students are free to arrange their own housing arrangements through personal contacts, if they wish. 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 board are not included in the tuition fee. The student pays the host family, dormitory, “pension,” or apartment owner directly for rent and meals. These matters are stipulated clearly in a program contract that students fill out with their host families or landlords.

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 champagne 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, 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, as well as weekend trips to more distant areas such as the chateaux of the Loire Valley, Mont St. Michel, the Berry, and Burgundy are an integral part of the program. Such excursions typically involve picnics, visits to vineyards and wine tastings, guided tours, and meals featuring regional specialties. Students who wish to participate in these day and weekend excursions are asked to pay a minimal fee; the program pays most of the costs.

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. We also provide a stipend to help pay for such activities.

Students also 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 then apply for a grant and complete a report (often in the form of a Web site/page or photo journal) when they return. 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 the “stage.”

Through the Centre Régional de Documentation Pédagogique (CRDP), an agency of the French Ministry of Education, students may volunteer to do a stage (internship) as English-language teaching assistants in Parisian primary or secondary schools, 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. Wesleyan and Vassar students may receive one-half credit for this stage if they receive a satisfactory evaluation from the host instructor and write a report about their experience. Students from other schools should ask their schools about the possibility of getting credit for this stage.

Opportunities to volunteer in Paris are provided through the “Centre du Bénévolat.” Working in French nonprofit organizations, students usually are placed in positions where they tutor schoolchildren in local, after-school programs on a regular basis. Other possibilities include working with AIDS patients and volunteering to help with local nonprofit events.

All 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.