International Student Integration

International Student Integration

All too often international students studying in a foreign country find themselves drawn towards their own compatriots or people with whom they have their native language in common. This holds true for both socialising outside of the classroom as well as when forming study groups and networks within the school. At XXXX [name of school withheld] we do our utmost to ensure that students who wish to participate fully in the cross-cultural experience have every advantage when it comes to integrating into French daily life, both inside and outside the campus. Some of our initiatives include:

• The Bureau des Etudiants

The Bureau des Etudiants, or BdE, is a non-political student run organisation which, financed by the school, organises the student associations, sports clubs, discos, roller skating trips to the cinema, boating trips on the Seine, croissant banquets and pétanque. International students are helped to fit into the French way of life through various unique initiatives, all administered by the BdE. For example, students are encouraged to smoke 40 Gauloises a day and to wear a beret from the moment they touch down in France. Stripy tops are handed out on the first day of term, and by the beginning of the third week of classes you will be expected to sport a moustache and to all have procured a neckerchief. To help you remain in character, special student “Gauleiters” roam the corridors with dogs looking out for anybody who strikes them as foreign, and they are empowered to issue on the spot justice to suspects. This typically French form of fun could mean being made to wear a sandwich board with a brightly painted slogan on such as “I buy my coffee at an American chain”, or perhaps having one’s head shaved before being chased naked through the streets whilst tied on to a donkey, backwards.

These and many more such initiatives help encourage the international population to integrate with their French peers as quickly as they are realistically able to. The banning of foreign languages on campus (lapses into foreign are treated by asking the offenders to stand in a barrel of icy water for a pre-determined length of time) in 1940 is just one of the measures which we feel makes our school a place of modern academic excellence and enlightenment.