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.

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.