Professors pleased with "experience" of academic rigor

IFE’s academic internship programs converge student desires for exciting experiences (as well as a chance to enhance their resumé) with their teachers’ desire for a serious learning exercise, through internship placements that are great places for research. Guided by their research advisor, students discover that their internship is really a field study opportunity, in addition to a chance to get to know France today in very real, familiar way. In the end, everyone’s goals are met: fascinating encounters, professional contacts, intellectual challenges…in short, a learning curve still steep several months out.

IFE’s local-contact expertise solicited for new study abroad programs

With long experience in introducing talented students to France today in stimulating and useful ways, IFE finds itself being asked to operate semester study abroad programs in Paris for US undergraduate institutions. Fall 2005 saw the re-launch of the Goucher Randolph Macon Paris Semester, now operated by IFE. For Fall 2006, IFE is spearheading an innovative one-semester program by Franklin and Marshall College for second-year students combining language learning with cultural learning, in the aim of preparing students for intensive language-based overseas programs in their third or fourth year.

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Mother Tongues

"When I was five years old I visited the Pearl Harbor Memorial in Hawaii with my Russian-born mother. At the end of the exhibit we watched a film entitled "The Second World War". I was both totally absorbed and confused by the battle scenes, first-hand accounts and long narration of the war in the Pacific accompanied by a short sequence on the war in Europe, and at the end I turned to my mother to ask ’who won the war?’. Furious at a presentation of WWII so given over to the role of the US, my mother responded, in a loud voice and to the great shock of the other visitors, ’the Soviet Union won the War!’"...

Is Everything Culture?

For some years IFE has included in its preparatory curriculum some instruction on the role of the State in culture and the importance of cultural policy in French society. Part of culture is memory, and this year France remembers that fifty years ago the newly formed Fifth Republic of France instituted a Ministry of Culture, etablishing in modern administrative form the art-supporting role the State has played in France since the Rennaissance. ...

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Twenty Years Out

With an ardent belief in the theories of Christopher Columbus, IFE is certain that IFE alums have not fallen off the edge of the world, but rather that they are somewhere on its round and wonderful surface... but where? Doing what? As increasing numbers of post-dot-e-d-u email addresses are identified, a wealth of fascinating detail emerges : ...