Language: Daily language study increases your effectiveness in your work placement and in your every encounter in Paris. Courses tailored to your abilities will be offered by Gap Year staff, who are native speakers and skilled language teachers.

Forum meetings with your fellow students, the program docent, and visitors, are designed to ground your work experience in readings, research and informed conversations. You'll take a quick march through French history; engage in discussions of front-page topics engaging the French in heated debates; outside speakers; newspapers, from tabloid to the weighty. If you come to know a bit about Charles de Gaulle's role in WWII, your understanding of that veteran you meet at the drop-in center will be greatly expanded; and you will see how that immigrant child you encounter is directly connected to France's colonial past.

The Project: You will also be asked to develop your own project. It might come from a long-held interest, or a topic suggested by what you've read for your Forum meetings or what you've seen on an Architecture walk, or a prompt from your work site (an oral history of one of the African refugee families?).

Paris as a City and Weekends: Structured tours with an architect/urban planner bring you to an understanding of the decisions that gave us modern Paris. What does Haussmann's Paris tell us about Paris today? What was the impulse prompting Mitterrand's Grands Travaux? Who lives in central Paris? The banlieues?

You will have ample time to explore Paris on your own, but twice monthly, our group will explore another piece of France, perhaps Paris, perhaps farther afield. Of course, the iconic sites of Versailles, Chartres and Vaux le Vicomte are on the list, but you will also see the banlieues (Saint Denis, Mantes-la-Jolie), Lille, Aix-en-Provence, and Strasbourg.