Advice for Prospective Study-Abroad Students

I've had a bit of time to reflect back on my experience, and honestly, if I could do it all over again, I would, but with a different study abroad program. I really didn't think too much about my decision to do IES Paris, even though my school offers five different Paris study abroad programs. I had chosen IES Tokyo for the fall because I'd already had experiences with them when I went on my Janterm 2006 trip to Japan, and I knew that if I chose IES Paris for the spring I could get a slight discount on my expenses. So that was it, that sold me, I didn't look at any details, I didn't check to see what kind of a program it would be, nothing. I blindly chose it.

Big mistake! Please, prospective students, don't do that. Do some careful research on the programs your school offers (if it offers more than one for your desired location). Below, I'll highlight some major sources of dissatisfaction I had with my program, and thus things to look out for in a program.

The classes
My biggest, #1 beef with the program is that it is its own universe. The IES Paris Center is located on a quiet market street in a completely different part of town than the usual university area with all the other schools. There are the offices, computer labs, and a building of classrooms out back. That's it! That's everything! That's where all your classes, or at least most of them, will be. That's where you'll be spending the majority of your time and that's where you'll be limited to meeting people, for the most part. You can take outside classes at French universities, generally one or two in addition to your IES classes, but the scheduling is so difficult to work out that it's almost not worth it (that turned out to be my case, much as I struggled to make it fit). I did take one outside class for Japanese, and it was such a great experience just to get me out of that bubble that I wish more of that had been my time there. But it wasn't.

So basically, when you go to classes, you're not mingling with other French or international students. You're just interacting with other Americans--not who you came to Paris to meet, right? Sure, they're fun to get to know, but they're not going to help you improve your French, no matter how everyone attempts to natter on in badly-accented grammatically-incorrect French to each other. And yes, the IES classes are taught all in French by French professors, but it still felt terribly closed-off to only be in them with other Americans. It pretty much feels like you came to Paris to study abroad and ended up going to some special American school which has no connection to the French university life you supposedly came to experience. IES Paris and its classes form its own self-contained bubble, which it is very hard to break out of.

What I would have much rather preferred is if, first of all, the Center itself was located where all the other French universities are (the Latin Quarter) so we have a much greater chance of running into other French students at cafes nearby or at least simply seeing them on the street, as opposed to old ladies lugging their rolly grocery suitcases to and from the market. Second, while the Center can offer its own IES classes, they should at least be held in the classrooms of one of the French universities, so we can go to school in the same building as other French students and have a greater chance of running into them and making friends with them.
(For a working example of this, they can simply look at IES Tokyo.)

The housing options
I chose homestay first and foremost because I wanted my own room. I'd had roommates for the first two years of college, and while I got along with them, I was ready to move on and grow up and have my own room. I'd had my own room in Japan the preceding semester; I was not ready to give that up again. I also chose homestay because after choosing dorm the previous semester, I'd realized I was in a minority, and it was making it hard to fit in with the friends I was making initially (as they would have different meetings to go to, etc), and I wanted to be a part of the majority the next time around to minimize that awkward out-of-place feeling at the beginning.

With IES Paris, the only way to be guaranteed your own room is to do a homestay. There are a variety of dorm choices, but they all involve a roommate. In terms of language immersion, of course homestay is one of the most encouraged routes, but sometimes that's just not what you want, but you also don't want to share a room and have to deal with any possible ensuing drama. Simply put, there need to be more options.

Moreover, in those dorm options, your roommate is always going to be another American IES student. Back to the IES bubble--even in your housing options, you're only ever going to run into other Americans, never anyone outside the English-speaking world, which puts you at a MAJOR disadvantage and leaves you wondering if you ever experienced real French life at all.

I found out from someone who did a different Paris program that her program had a MUCH wider array of options, and also that if you chose dorm/apartment housing, you weren't going to be placed with other Americans. You were going to be placed in an actual, non-IES-only dorm inhabited by OTHER foreigners from other countries besides America with whom your only language in common would be French, so you'd have to speak French with them. Wow! What an ideal option. When I heard about this, a wave of jealousy swept over me. It would have been perfect. And I only wish I could have been able to choose something like this. But I couldn't, because IES Paris keeps its students in a bubble.

The meal plan
This is the worst part. If you are in a homestay, you only get two dinners a week with your host family. You get breakfast every morning, but only two dinners a week. That is ridiculous.

Apparently you used to get meals every night, but lots of students abused this privilege and would stay out and not tell their families they were coming back home, so the extra food went to waste, etc. That's great and all--but not all of us are flaky like that. Some of us want to have dinner with our host families every night, because here are our options for the off nights:

1) go out with your friends to eat. First of all, each person's host family has different designated dinner nights. So first you have to make sure your friends can even eat with you--and it often happens that everyone you ask is eating with their family, and you are the only one not. Second, you have to find a place to eat that is affordable. This is nearly impossible in Paris. Eating dinner in a café/restaurant is going to run you about $15-25, and cheaper options such as buying a crepe or kebab on the street, or hitting McDonald's or a similar fast food institution, may be slightly cheaper (though not by much) but they will almost certainly cause you to gain weight if you make it a habit, and since it's a cheap option that wound up being one thing we did a lot (and I did, in fact, gain weight!). Early in the program my friends and I tried eating at university cafeterias, which are incredibly cheap, but the cheapness means you will be eating disgusting barely-edible food with homeless people. Wow! Thank you, IES Paris! This is indeed exactly why I chose to study abroad: so I could eat gross food with homeless people just so I don't go broke trying to pay for my meals. How did you know!!

2) stay at home with your family and feel really really awkward as they all go to the dining room to eat, while you stay in your room. I CANNOT EXPRESS HOW AWKWARD THIS IS. And sometimes it's unavoidable that you stay home, because you need to write a paper or study for a test. Technically, yes, I could have made my own meals in the kitchen, but that would have also been very awkward, as I would have been cooking either before or after their meal. What I would end up doing is purchasing some pre-made lunch food (pasta cups, vegetable sides, sandwiches etc) from Monoprix grocery store, then eating it in my room. But it always felt so pathetic and I hated it, and I hated that except for two nights a week, unless I wanted to spend extra money and/or eat fatty yet cheap food and/or eat cheap food in a dangerous environment, the program itself was forcing me to feel anxious and crappy about myself.

Both of those options suck, and I can't believe we couldn't just choose "I want dinner two nights a week" or "I want dinner every night" and have the price adjusted accordingly. But no, everyone has to suffer thanks to a few bad apples in the past. Great.

Of course, in other Paris (and other) study abroad programs I heard of, and in IES Tokyo, dinner happened every night a week (with maybe a break on Sunday or the whole weekend). Of course! Anything, it seems, is better than what IES Paris offers.

The field trips
Apparently, I was very spoiled during IES Tokyo and our two multiple-night trips away (fully included in our fees, nothing extra charged), which felt like a fun class trip and which gave all the students a great chance to hang out with each other and bond, while sightseeing in a different part of the country we might not have ventured to otherwise. I was incredibly shocked to learn that for IES Paris, all the trips except one were day trips to various cities around Paris. And you couldn't even go on all the trips; due to the amount of students my semester (130+) there were about six options and you could choose two. The one overnight visit (only one night overnight) to Normandy was evidently so popular yet space was so limited that if you wanted to go, you had to write an essay explaining why, and those who'd written the best essays were chosen to go. And obviously the overnight trip cost more than the day trips but I don't recall receiving a refund check due to not going on it, so it's pretty unfair that a more expensive trip was treated the same as all the rest. It all felt extremely cheap. Like, "We have more students this year than usual, so even though everyone's paying the same amount as previous years, IF NOT MORE, everyone will get shortchanged even more than usual"--by only doing day trips, and only 2/6 trips are possible, etc.

Utterly ridiculous! Day trips are something we could have easily done on our own; I felt like we were shortchanged out of the opportunity to go on one extended vacation somewhere as an entire group, say the south of France (Nice, Marseilles, etc), all expenses paid by IES as part of our fees. I realize that if IES gave us several days off in a row some people would seize the opportunity to do their own traveling (in addition to our weeklong spring break), but most of us would be economical and realize that we should go on the trip we'd already paid for. So I really hated the "day trips are the only field trips" aspect of it. I would have liked for IES to use the field trip funds to take me to other regions of France it would be harder for us to get to on our own, like the Loire Valley, Brittany, what have you--not towns surrounding Paris we could do on our own like Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte, Giverny, etc (as delightful as those trips were... they just weren't worth it if we could have had an extended overnight trip instead).

The program itself
I think the IES Paris program can be almost perfectly encapsulated in how we were instructed to get to our Paris lodgings upon arrival at the airport: completely by ourselves. That's right. A bunch of American students arrive in a foreign city, one many of them have never been to, and are told they must make their own way, alone, in a city known for pickpockets and scammers ready to prey upon innocent tourists, to where they will be staying in Paris, whether it be dorm, homestay, what have you.

When I first read those instructions I could not believe it. With IES Tokyo, upon our arrival we were met at the airport by IES Tokyo staff members, who helped us buy bus tickets, convert our money, forward our luggage along, and get on the bus. Then they led us to the hotel we would be staying at during orientation. Staying at a hotel as one big group for a few days was a great way to get to know everyone else in the program and start off the semester, but IES Paris orientation was nothing like that. After arriving at our lodgings, we commuted--by ourselves--into the IES Paris center, where we were divided into two groups and watched some slideshows and heard some lectures. At the end of those few days we had a dinner on a boat along the Seine. But still--if you weren't going out of your way to hang out with people outside of class, it wasn't happening. Not everyone is magically gifted at making friends, and this left a lot of people in the cold (myself included to some degree). When we were all staying at the same hotel, engaged in scheduled activities every night, it definitely fostered friendships a lot easier!

Arriving in Paris alone, taking a taxi alone, meeting my homestay family alone, then traveling across Paris to the IES center alone--it was all very, well, lonely and unsettling. The beginning of a semester often sets the tone for the rest of it, and I just don't think IES Paris does a good job of setting a "we'll take care of you whatever you need" tone. It was more aloof, cool, "we'll do what we can I suppose but we're shoving you out there on your own whether you like it or not." And it wasn't a great feeling to experience, especially when you've paid thousands of dollars for the privilege.

Overall, please don't go with IES Paris unless everything I've described above suits your needs (and frankly, a lot of the kind of people I was meeting in the program did seem like the type to be satisfied by that, since all they were after was a home base out of which they could fly to various European tourist destinations every weekend, but I was looking for something more, and this had big ramifications on how likely I was to find a group of friends who fit well with me--as it turned out, not that likely at all). So research your options. Put some thought into this! Don't make the same mistake I did. :)