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“Without that orientation week, I could barely have gotten off the plane to start classes,” says Jihye Lee, a new South Korean student earning a Master’s degree in chemistry and life sciences. “Now I realize how lost I would have been, and I would have found it difficult to concentrate.”

Specially designed for international students enrolled in PSL Master’s programs during the 2018-2019 academic year, PSL O’Week is new this year. Chloé Pradal-Morand, who’s responsible for international recruiting and services at PSL, explains:
“In 2016 PSL introduced the Welcome Desk, a student-run organization whose members, all bilingual, coordinate events for international students, including cultural outings, runs at tourist sites, cooking classes and other types of get-togethers. For 2018 we decided to expand those services by hosting a series of workshops prior to the start of the school year, designed to help international students address the problems and needs they encounter when they arrive on campus. Naturally, that can include helpful advice on finding housing or opening a bank account, but the workshops also include conversations on issues that are easy for us to overlook, such as dealing with culture shock or learning how student work opportunities are organized.”

To develop this orientation week, PSL turned to its partners at Study&Co, a start-up that specializes in providing support to students (such as help with administrative paperwork). Established in 2017 by Dania Andreakou and Héloïse Rey, two student entrepreneurs at PSL-Pépite, the young company was inspired by the difficulties encountered by its two founders when they arrived in Paris.

During their orientation week, the new PSL students – backed by the new team on the Welcome Desk and from Study&Co – took part in a variety of workshops that were both fun and practical. The agenda included advice for the students on negotiating the bureaucracy, feedback from current international students, a stroll through Paris’s 5th arrondissement, a cooking workshop and even a trip by bus to the Ikea store – in short, everything the students might need to forge new ties and get their bearings.

“Sure, there’s Google Maps, which prevents me from getting lost completely, but that’s not always enough,” says Augusto Diaz. “During O’Week, we took the time to discover the local neighborhood. I feel much more at ease, at least in this little section of Paris.” Augusto, who hails from Buenos Aires, has just joined the multidisciplinary “Institutions, Organizations, Economics, and Society” Master’s degree program at PSL.
More broadly, O’Week gives students an ideal opportunity to become familiar with the campus and identify the people who’ll be able to help them during their entire experience at PSL. The Welcome Desk continues to operate after Orientation Week. The office is manned on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm and on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:00 noon to 6:00 pm. The Welcome Desk also organizes events such as bowling and karaoke contests as well as potluck dinners, where students bring a special dish from their home country.