Study Abroad in Paris Past Review

I regret that you did not feel that you were prepared by Wellesley for your semester in Paris, but I also feel the need to point out that you were in China during the fall semester and were not able to attend the pre-departure meetings organized on campus. That said, the program really is best students for students who do not need a lot of support. Jennifer Thomas-Starck Director of International Study

Wellesley June 02, 2010

I am sure i did fine with the semester, and i did split time for the pre departure meetings with both France and china in the spring of last year. Granted, I may not have gotten everything out of it, but I did . In the end, I did fine, and was able to make everything work. However, despite this, I believe that Wellesley should have given more support and guidance to students who are appearing in a foreign country with next to no support. I understand the difference between this and and the program that I did in China, and the fact that that program had a lot more support. I just felt that it would have been useful to have more guidance for things such as finding housing (resources you could use), things to expect, and I think that the OIS should have made it clear that they would pay for the program, which I only learned later and had no reason to expect that it would, given that Wellesley has made it perfectly clear that only tuition costs were covered by Wellesley. I apologize for not being more clear in my assessment. However, I feel that Wellesley should provide more resources and guidance to students who are going to a foreign country in which they will be fending for themselves. Despite everything, I truly did enjoy my time in Paris, but for reasons that were not listed in abroad101s questions, and I recognize that while I most definitely do not prefer the teaching meathods of the Sciences Po to Wellesley, there were definitely things to have been learned from my experience here. I will also comment that the student body at the Sciences Po as well as other students abroad that Ive talked to offer the same critiques of the education system that I have, and that they are working on changing them, specifically to add more discussion and analysis to classes. I also have one more thing to add. I was required to attend meetings on how to deal with standing out in Asia, which, quite honestly, I did not find particularly useful to my time there. While a number of the incites were interesting, they did not offer much that was either not said in the original pre departure meetings or that is not common sense for people who have previously done a lot of traveling, which I have. I also noted that there was not a meeting of this type held for people who went to a European country. While I concede that blending in to the majority of the population and social norms is easier here, perhaps another meeting or at least an extensive reference guide could be put together for students who are going to have to, as a necessity of where they are attending school, have to cope with more factors of living abroad, such as finding an apartment, dealing with utilities, insurance, opening a bank account and the steps by which to do that and paperwork needed. I agree that the Paris program is best for people who do not need support, but I wholeheartedly believe that Wellesley should have provided more than it did and given us a better idea of what to expect. The pre departure meeting I attended was nearly entirely taken up with discussion regarding the Aix en Provence program and, while I recognize that many more students take part in that program than the Sciences Po's, there needs to be equal support for both and equal information provided for both, especially due to the circumstances of Sciences Po, and, the fact that coming in the 2nd semester, regardless of where I was before, makes it next to impossible to find housing at one of the student quarters located in the city. I do not feel that Wellesley did this, and, as a result, left its students in Paris to fend for themselves, even to the extent of using the resources of other schools to figure out what needs to be done once in-country.

lmcgraw June 02, 2010