While surfing the net a week or so ago, I came across the website Paris Unraveled (I'm not going to link to it so the owner of the site doesn't see the references), and I'm a bit troubled by it.
Paris Unraveled is a consulting service for people moving or coming to France for work (especially as teaching assistants and au pairs) or study. For a price, the owner offers to help you with administrative paperwork, guide you through procedures, and even set certain things up for you. The services seems exclusively geared towards individuals wanting to come to France and not employees/families transferred to France by their employer.
I get it that moving to France is complicated, and the knowledge you accumulate by living here for a while has value, but the services that are offered almost make it too easy.
For instance, you can pay to join a private forum, where one of the benefits is "Personalized editing and feedback on all of your correspondence in French and all of your assignments in the French university."
If you're enrolled in a program at a French university that's taught in French (so you're supposed to have a solid level) and someone is correcting all of your work, are you really earning that degree on your own? I'll admit my husband and aunt-in-law helped correct the French in my Master's thesis, but all the other work I did during my program I did on my own (I also spent a lot of time writing the thesis in the first place without any help).
There's also the one hour consultation at $125 to help you determine what kind of visa you should apply for. And the 8 week Undergraduate University Placement Service that guides you through applying to a French university ($795!!!). If you want help applying to a doctoral program it's $1095 (for details look for the visa application consulting service and scroll down the pdf in the middle of the page).
With prices like that, what are we all doing blogging for free about our experiences!?!
After five years of working for a public university, I know how different everything else from the American system, and it can be overwhelming to try and figure everything out. But I'm not sure that paying several hundred or even thousands of dollars for someone to walk you through it is the best solution. Moving to a foreign country is intrinsically difficult, confusing, complicated, and long. But being motivated to do it despite being aware of the difficulties means you will probably be resilient when you get here and savvy enough to figure things out when you have future problems. If you aren't motivated enough to study in France to spend several hours on the Onisep or CampusFrance websites, maybe you shouldn't be coming to France.
4 comments:
I don't get why anyone who wants a real learning experience in France would pay for any of those services.
But I can imagine it being a solution for people who want to just throw money at a problem and have it work out, and I'm sure there are lots of people like that in the world, but I have a hard time believing that they're student-age...
Also I think most French people have someone read through their masters theses (or even internship reports) just because it's so easy to make spelling/grammar mistakes in French.
People pay for convenience and what they think "expertise" can buy, as if they could jump the line (which is pretty hilarious when you know the French bureaucracy...!).
People are also... ahem... strange. I can't believe how many people email me to ask me how to immigrate to Canada. There is a freaking official website from Citizenship and Immigration describing the entire process! How can they find my blog but not official sources??
Ha, well I suppose it makes me feel more impressed with myself at any rate. People often say things like it's brave to have moved over here (and various places in between) and I usually just shrug it off, but maybe it's a bigger deal than it seems to me. Or maybe people are just lazy and dumb ;)
@Gwan I know what you mean about feeling more impressed with yourself. Seeing how much the website charges for help with various things makes me feel like a)I was really smart to figure everything out on my own and b)I am so valuable!
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